


Vanilla

by bikeaesthetic



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Abusive Parent(s), Alternate Universe - High School, Anxiety, F/F, Implied Physical Abuse, Racism, Rough Draft, Violent/Gory Imagery, Work In Progress, yumikuri
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-28 05:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2720804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bikeaesthetic/pseuds/bikeaesthetic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ymir finds an old shoebox full of old memories and letters, she decides to find the writer.  (Ymir/Historia is the only pairing, no others implied or mentioned)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Enter Remission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Love is a fickle thing and so is Historia

_**1.** _

 

**Enter Remission**

 

 

Historia doesn’t dream often.  Usually, she closes her eyes and sinks into sleep and buries her pretty face in her pillows.  She wakes up, she gets dressed, she ignores the pit in her stomach and the lump in her throat.  For some reason, with each passing night she lays her head on the pillow, the weight grows bigger and bigger, until she feels like vomiting in the middle of homeroom.

But tonight is some sort of horrible exception.  Even though her brain has long since stopped turning and she lies as still as a log in her bed, even though she can’t stand thoughts of the past, it just happens.

Historia often likes to think that dreams are the product of a cluttered mind.

_(Not the product of guilt, or sadness, or hatred.)_

_(Not the product of happiness, either.)_

 

She’s back in her old home.  The grout in the shower is yellowed, riddled with mildew and something black that’s been there so long she’s starting to think that the house is cracking, that something deep and dark is finding its way into their house through moldy crevices and unfinished tiling.

Her face is upturned to the hot water.  Her mother will berate her for such a long shower, but her skin feels dirty and itchy.  Historia’s mother will buy expensive dresses and too tall heels, but she won’t pay the water bill.  Maybe all that perfume her mother soaks in serves as a bath.

But not for Historia.  She likes feeling the water coarse through her thin hair and color her pale skin pink.  She likes that soreness afterwards, when her skin is scrubbed raw and her face is fresh.  She especially likes the fresh smell of shampoo and soap as she falls asleep.

The water hits her sore neck and shoulders just right, so that her thin muscles uncoil and her bones feel loose at her sides.  The thin stream of high-pressure water makes its way down her ribs.  It makes her feel clean.  Pure.

The water suddenly begins to thin.  Soon, all she can hear are droplets of water hitting the slick shower floor.  Water falls from her hair and legs and arms, making tiny shallow puddles on the bathroom floor.  She frowns at the sudden cold, looking up at the leaking showerhead.  She puts a tentative finger beneath the slowing droplets.

They burn her skin, leaving it raw and red.  When she looks at the finger, the grooves of her fingerprint have been melted off.  They look featureless, wrong.  The burn makes her skin white and pink, and it hurts so much she pops the finger into her mouth.  She hopes it will take the edge off.

The pipes creak and begin to move again.  Historia looks up, and water streams from the showerhead again.  But it’s boiling hot.

She screams.

It hits her eyes first, fusing eye and eyelid, scorching the moist air she tries to breathe in.  When Historia opens her mouth, hoping for a gasp of air, it travels down her esophagus, settles in the pit of her stomach, and burns her skin away from the inside.

Now she can hardly scream.  The boiling water has destroyed her vocal cords, made her tongue swell in her mouth.  She can’t breathe either.  The air is too hot and humid.  It hurts to inhale.  It hurts to move even, and she can’t even crawl past the shower curtain.  Historia is powerless.  Sleepy.  She presses her face to the bathroom floor and tries not to feel anything.

 

She wakes up, and her surroundings are real this time.  Historia’s covers are soaked with sweat and her hands are balled in tiny fists.  After a few gasps of mercifully cool air, she closes her eyes again.  They feel nice against her eyes.  It almost feels like her first time feeling cool air against her skin.  

The sun hasn’t risen yet, but Historia doesn’t care.  She throws her blanket off and lays on her side in bed and stares at the blank wall.  There’s a yellowish looking stain near the corner of her room, half hidden behind a potted plant.  She spends what feels like an hour raking her eyes over the wall, looking for blemishes and imperfections.  And she finds them.

A soft voice interrupts her meditative state.  Historia realizes how heavy her eyelids feel, but she just opens them wider.

"Historia?"  A voice asks, slightly worried.  "It's time to wake up.  Lorraine wants you down quick, before your father leaves.  He has big business in Miami today and he'll be leaving soon."

Historia stands, shuffling to the door.  She lifts her hand to smooth down her hair, which feels knotted and dry under her slim fingers.  With the other hand, she opens the door a crack.

Anne is a pretty woman, a twenty-seven year old who’s attending college forty five minutes from Historia’s house.  Her parents live in a neighborhood somewhere in the city, and they own the cleaning service Anne hails from.  She’s mousy, with brown hair and hazel eyes.  Sometimes she wears chunky glasses when she loses her contact case.  But she never loses Historia’s or her mother’s things.  

Historia smiles and slips out the door.  Anne returns it, with a toothy smile, teeth seeming too big for her small mouth.  She accompanies Anne down the stairs to the dining room, chatting politely and smiling as much as possible at Anne.  The wood beneath Historia's bare feet feels cold and hard and she feels like singing praises to Anne, who waxes the cherry-wood tiled floors daily.

"Historia!"  She hears a smiling voice say from the dining room.  Her step-father, Rod,  is sitting there, suit jacket slung over his chair and sleeves rolled up.  A bowl of cereal sits in front of him, along with a cup of yogurt and steaming coffee.  

"How are you, darling?"  He asks, lines against his eyes creasing and mouth widening.  He’s a small man, only three inches taller than Historia.  But his shoulders are wide and his chest is a great barrel.  It fills his suits up and makes him look much larger when he speaks.  And that always helps him when he argues to the great crowds of people.  Sometimes he looks a bit like a preacher, waving his hands, face just the slightest bit red.    

"I'm great, father.  I saw you're up a point in the polls!  You're doing such a good job!"  Historia answers.  Rod is running for Senate his third term in a row.  Her chair groans against the polished wooden floor when she pulls it out, and she returns Rod's smile.  It's just a little smaller and a little more tired.  Rod nods at Historia's enthusiastic assertions, leaning back in his own chair.  

"We're finally recovering after I revealed my stance on abortion clinics and birth control.  You're so diligent, Historia."  They share a small smile before Rod continues.  "How are you doing in school?  And that one class you were so excited about... Introduction to Medicine?  The one you're able to take now because you took AP Biology last year?"  Historia's smile tightens at Rod's words and her eyes dim just a little bit.  

"Oh it was great!  My teacher told me I did exceptionally well, especially in my knowledge of the anatomical structures of the human body."  she smiles tightly and looks at her hands, folded under the table.  "But, that class was last semester.   I'm taking Drawing Basics right now."  

"Ah yes, I'm so sorry dear.  How's that class?"  He asks, sipping his coffee.  

"It's great.  There's a girl in my class, with freckles, who draws these-"  Historia begins, a softer curve to her lips now.  Before she can finish, her father's phone beeps urgently and he leans down to answer it.  

"Oh dear, 6:00 already?  I have to go Historia, I have a conference call.   I'll talk to you in a few days, I'll be back from my campaign tour by then.  I'll stay home for a whole month before I leave again, dear.   But for now I need to take this."  Rod speaks to Historia hurriedly, not noticing how Historia's smile suddenly looks tighter than usual.  

"Oh just go.  There's no way I could stand in the way of your campaign, father.  Good luck."  Historia smiles and waves as Rod exits the dining room.  Rod wiggles his fingers at her before turning and leaving.  His words reach Historia, smooth voice obviously happy.  

"Hm?  Oh yeah, that was Historia.  Greatest blessing in my life, don't know what I'd do without her."  Chuckling, Rod walks into his room before Historia can hear anything else.  

Wordlessly, Historia accepts a bowl of Cream of Wheat and a mug of green tea from Anne.  She leaves the tea on the table, noticing the steam rising from it.  The cream of wheat is thankfully cool, laced with brown sugar, almost sickeningly sweet.  Historia’s spoon scrapes at the bottom of the bowl, despite the protests of her stomach.  Anne smiles sweetly at her before shuffling away.   

Historia spares a glance at her father in his conference call before heading out the door.  His voice is loud and she can hear what he says, but she doesn’t care enough to make out the words.  Rod reminds her of a bear, large, imposing, and bumbling.  She doesn’t understand what his supporters see in him.  Even on stage, he looks too sweaty.  His hands are too broad, his voice is too large, and his ideas are too weak.  Rod Reiss is a weak man in Historia’s eyes.

The door opens softly, swinging on carefully oiled hinges.  The carefully maintained smile falls from her face, and her muscles soften.  Some sort of icy relief fills her, to not have to pretend anymore.  She casts an apathetic glance at her home and she shuts the door before walking out to her car.

It’s her mom’s old car, really.  The second of many, that her mother bought and abandoned with Rod’s money.  Newer, shinier, models always catch her mother’s eye and all of a sudden her credit card is out of her purse and she has the newest and coolest convertible.  Historia would probably waste Rod’s money, too, if she didn’t see her mother doing it all the time.  What she thinks she is most scared of is probably becoming her mother.  

_(Even though her mother is in love.  She sees her mother’s eyes light up when Rod is near her, when her mom glances at the ring on her finger.  She doesn’t see it when her mother looks at her)._

Her car is silver and alone in the driveway, shining and waxed.  The keys are already in her hand, and it opens with a click.  She climbs in and turns on the music.  She pretends the voices are far away, speaking to her from miles away, and she supposes they are.  The music is quiet.  It’s an afterthought to the sound of her shallow breath in the car.  The sun has risen over the rooftops, casting Historia’s hair and skin yellow.  She looks golden.  It makes her feel itchy.  The pit in her stomach grows, to the beat of her heart and the quiet crooning of the music.  She wishes her dream was real.

 

_(Dreams are the product of a cluttered mind)_

_(Maybe tears are too)._

 

She is nine years old and her eyes bleed icy blue and her veins are like rivers below her splotchy bleached skin.

"Ana?"  Historia says Ana’s name, partly to ask the woman a question, partly just to hear Ana’s name slide off her tiny tongue.  She says the name like a prayer.

"Yes, Historia?"  Ana’s voice is far smoother than Historia’s.  Sometimes the lilt of her voice trips over vowels and fumbles consonants.  Sometimes Ana doesn’t speak at all when she is around Historia’s mom.

"Where do you think my mom is?"  Historia doesn’t particularly care, but Ana’s voice is soft.  "She's been gone more often. But," Historia adds, almost as an afterthought, “I don’t really mind.”

"I don't know, mijita.  But she'll be back," Ana answers, smiling as Historia leans against her shoulder, braiding her dark hair.  It is thick and shiny and wavy.  Historia’s hair is thin and silky and doesn’t make braids as thick as Historia’s wrists.

"What if I don't want her to come back?"  Historia asks, icy eyes looking up into Ana's maple colored, brown sugar ones.  Sometimes, when Historia says things like this, Ana looks her straight in the eyes sternly.  Historia pretends to feel sorry.  

"No, your mother will be back and I will leave someday.  You can't change that."  Historia looks up at Ana with tired eyes and lets the now braided hair slip through her fingers.

"What if I wanted to change it though?"  Historia wonders, closing her eyes and trying to imagine a life with Ana and without her mother.  It’s not that hard, really, considering how often her mother is gone.  "You've always loved me more than my mom."

Ana just chuckles, curling Historia's tiny hand into her soft worn one.  She smells warm, like chili and sweat and cigarettes.  Ana is pretty, too.  Historia can’t think of another word for the woman’s wide hips and slim shoulders.  Ana’s nose is a soft curve against her high cheekbones and soft looking cheeks.  Her lips are full and pink and plump, even when she laughs, and she laughs a lot.  And her hands, they're large and broad and calloused.  When Ana closes them around Historia's hands they envelop hers.  

"Historia, you can do whatever you want.  If you do good in school you’ll surely be able to move out of here in no time.  You have a lot ahead of you. You’re only nine years old, Historia.  Remember that."  Ana smiles at Historia, soft and warm.

“You’re only nineteen, Ana,” Historia mutters.

“That mean mouth of yours will get you in trouble one day, you know,”  Ana smiles, and so does Historia.

 *** 

Ana leaves quickly and quietly.  She waves at Historia, almost sadly.  She’s very pretty when she does.  Historia smiles and waves and pretends Ana has just gone to get groceries.  Her mother doesn’t speak to her and Historia doesn’t either.  She just heats up a frozen tamale that Ana gave them for New Year’s and goes to sit in her room.  

There aren’t many things in her room.  There are school books, stacked in a corner that Historia hardly touches.  There are glasses near the head of her bed that she stole from her mom.  In a little line on her windowsill, there are pretty stones that she found with Ana.  The rest of the room is quiet and bare.

In the back of Historia’s closet, behind the piles of folded clothes, there is a shoebox.  The closet is a good hiding place, because her mom doesn’t like to buy clothes hangers so all her clothes sit on the floor.  And her mother, when she gets antsy and needs to clean everything and get rid of everything else, doesn’t touch anything in Historia’s room.  It’s probably just that she doesn’t care.

Historia pushes her a pile to the side and the shoebox is there.  It used to hold a pair of rainboots, so it’s extra big.  Now, it mostly holds papers and photos and little mementos from their house.  There are some old tiles that Historia pried from the side of the bathroom mirror.  And a small bone that was in her yard.  And, most importantly, things from Ana.  Things about Ana.  Things about her and Ana, together.  There are letters and receipts and photos, all neatly stacked.  The box smells like paper and dust.  She loves it.

Historia opens the box reverently, careful to keep her tamale away from the easily damaged papers.  She smiles a small and quiet smile, all to herself.  Hearing her mother’s footsteps, she packs the box back up and sits in her bed with a book.  Everything her mother does in this house is too loud.  Her heels snap too urgently against the ground and her perfume makes everything smell like something airbrushed.  Her mother takes up too much room in Historia’s world.  But it’s nice when Ana is there and her mother is not.  It’s quiet without her mother.  She wishes it could be that quiet all the time.

 

 


	2. A Mid-City Confessional

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ymir dreams too, differently. 
> 
> (warnings for implied physical abuse)

_**2.** _

**Mid-City Confessional**

 

Ymir dreams, often.  They are hard to remember, but she knows they are earthy and humid.  She is often disoriented when she wakes up, like she has fallen through the floor of the next world over and landed in her bed.  Today what she can remember is dirt, between her fingers, held damp in her spread palm.  It's packed under her ragged fingernails and she lets it stay there.  And then she falls through the sky, her feet trying to grow roots to catch herself.  She falls up, towards the sun.  And then it feels like she reaches some sort of threshold, and the blue sky shatters against her long limbs.

Sometimes she wishes she could stay in that other world.  

Today, she wakes from her dream to an abrupt silence.   Her home is not loud, not like the wind flying past her ears as she falls.  The silence sits heavy in her ears and in her lungs.  It feels like mercury in the pit of her stomach and in the tips of her fingers.  Perhaps her dreams have poisoned her with a hard metal bloodstream and she has forgotten once again.  

Ymir's thoughts are interrupted by her alarm clock.  It blows away the dust that has settled around her, bats at the spiderwebs hung between her thick eyelashes.  

She turns over, to see the time, blinking red on her bedstand.  7:35.  She has twenty minutes until school.  

Turning the other way, she sees her brother's and sister's beds empty.  The sheets are a little wrinkled, but the pillows are plump and their blankets are pulled tight over the bed.  

Soledad is only seven and Luis is thirteen.  She's always sharply aware of the age difference between herself and her siblings, and it makes her feel like she has to do at least something right.

Ymir rolls languidly from her bed, glancing around her rather barren room for clothing to wear, but finds none.  Looking down, Ymir decides her shorts and t-shirt are suitable for school, despite the stains at the hem of her shirt.  They make the white fabric of her shirt orange, in the shape of what looks like a badly drawn heart.  Ymir sighs and brushes her hand over it.  It's not like she'll stay at school for long, anyways.  

Outside her’s and her sibling’s room, it’s silent.  Her siblings are huddled around the table, bags under their eyes, struggling not to fall asleep.  Even looking at them makes Ymir feel even more tired than she already is.

“Sorry guys,”  Ymir yawns, closing her heavy eyelids for just a moment.

“Did your alarm clock ‘stop working’ again?” Soledad asks after spooning another scoop of plain Cheerios into her mouth.

“No.”  Ymir looks away. “Shut up and get your stuff ready for school.”  Ymir turns to get herself some of that cereal.

“We’re ready ,”  Luis calls out, and Ymir's stomach plummets for a moment.  With guilt or excitement, she doesn't know.

"You're ready already?" She teases, stealing a bite of the toast Luis left uneaten on his plate.  "Don't be so responsible - you'll have to pay rent, too, soon."

"Ymir, you're super irresponsible and you still have to chip in for rent."  Soledad's words are harsh, but she smirks in almost the same way Ymir does when she says it.  She reminds Ymir of herself, despite being lighter-skinned and softer-faced.  It scares her, that someone could end up like her.  

Turning around, Ymir sticks her tongue out at her siblings and grabs her shoes and backpack, all in one smooth movement.  Her nimble fingers lace her shoes, careful not to distress the already frayed ends.  She doesn't wear socks, because she's not sure she could find a pair of her own socks anyways.  

"Get in the car, you losers, or else you won't get to ride in the back."  Ymir loves the way her siblings' eyes light up at the mention of riding in the back of her pickup truck to school.  Luis isn't often overtly happy.  He's very solemn-faced, but when she says that he breaks out in a toothy smile.  There's a gap between his front teeth.  Sometimes Luis really looks like their dad.  His joy is quiet.  Soledad laughs enough for the both of them as Luis hustles her out the door.  He chuckles quietly as he holds his sister's hand.

Compared to Soledad and Ymir, Luis is gentle.  Soft.  He's soft spoken and his voice is full and kind.  He doesn't have an accent like their mother's but he has that low velvety voice.  He has softly curling hair and just barely-there freckles.  Even though he's tall, the jut of his shoulders and hips are round, smooth.   Luis is all curves and soft lines.  

Soledad is loud.  Her skin is shades lighter than Ymir's and Soledad's and her hair is cinnamon brown.  She doesn't have their freckles, but she shares the hazel-golden eyes.  Her hair is stick straight and thick, just like Ymir's, and Soledad loves when her sister cards her hands through her hair.  

Ymir shuts the door and locks it behind her, taking care to slip the key into her backpack.  Soledad can't stand still, but Luis holds her hand and keeps her away from the street.  Even though his expression is a little tight, he's still smiling.  

"Get in, you nerds."  They don't need to be told twice.  Luis and Soledad are holding hands in the back, fingers intertwined, backs against the cold metal of Ymir's old pick up truck.  Laughing, she slips into the drivers seat.  In a fluid motion and a tinkling of shiny metal, she turns the ignition and pulls her car out of the parking spot, before listening to the coughing and purring of the engine as it just about crawls down the street.  The engine growls in a guttural manner, as though the apartments and alleys and dumpsters are monsters of the most ferocious kind.  

In the back, Luis and Soledad speak in hushed voices, Luis holding his sister’s tiny hands and body tight.  They are careful to duck down when another car passes, Soledad giggling and Luis shushing her, hands over her soft lips.  He laughs quietly too.

Ymir doesn’t play any music.  She lets the lyrical sounds of her siblings fill her ears, instead.  

The school comes quickly into sight.

The elementary school is less than a mile from the high school.  It’s a much smaller building, but it looks no more inviting.  The old flowerbox, which must have been purchased with an ancient grant, are hardly taken care of.  A large bush now grows from it, overflowing, so that the overgrown weeds hidden beneath the foliage can not be seen.  

Everything else is barren of plant life.  There is no grassy courtyard, no baseball field.  The only playground is made of metal.  One swing is higher than the other and they groan loudly whenever any weight is placed on them.  The silvery slide attracts heat like nothing else.  On particularly hot days, it can burn small hands and feet that touch it too long.

Sometimes grassroot campaigns start in another neighborhood to revitalize the school.  The rich white neighborhoods will raise money, from things like art auctions or concerts or bake sales, for the unfortunate kids at this one.  Aging white women from the PTO will come and take pictures and smile and leave.  Things like the flowerbox, or the two extra water fountains, are remnants of those times.

But people are not as easily built as things are.

Ymir is quiet as Luis and Soledad hop out of her truck.  They wave goodbye to her, and she waves back with a grin.  Luis walks Soledad into the school, his hand softly gripping her shoulder and his eyes focused ahead of them.  He’s a good kid, better than Ymir ever was.  Is.

Ymir steers herself towards school.  Her calloused hands move over the smooth, worn wheel with a tired familiarity.  Her skin feels numb and too hot, like a fire is wrapping around her, burning oxygen and skin alike.  Raw red, freckled, destroyed, she imagines skin peeling away over her bright, white bones.  Ymir could swear the air she breaths burns her nostrils.  She turns the crank on her door to bring the car window down and breaths in the urban air.  It feels heavier than any blanket on her thin shoulders.

Easing her foot against the brake, Ymir comes to a slow stop behind a line of cars, shimmering in the sparse summer sun like packs of beetles.   They move sluggishly, the warmth burning their wings, fusing them against their segmented body.   They can't do anything but move in this orderly executory fashion, in between bright silver Subarus and dented, worn Toyotas.  

She looks out the window of her truck, biting down on the skin of her thumb.  She has no more nails to bite off.

The cars begin to move again, like a slow-moving funeral procession.  It's almost 8:00, and Ymir glances at her car’s clock absentmindedly.  Time moves past her and everyone and everything else, slipping through numb fingers, embedding itself under her nails.  

Finally, slower than decomposition, Ymir is able to pull into the school's parking lot. According to her cell phone, it's already 8:02.  The green letters on a gray background are almost invisible, even in the shade.  Sliding it into her bag, Ymir picks up her pace and walks through the front doors without looking at the administrator, who is chatting with a tall, white, mustachioed security guard.  He and Ymir make eye contact, and she turns her chin up at him, as if daring him to say something to her.  He doesn't, and she enters the chaos of passing period.   

She wades through a sea of heads and hands and bodies, some taller, some shorter, some like willows and some like redwoods.  

Ymir has art first period.  Technically, she should be in homeroom, but her homeroom teacher scares her.  She decides to head to her art classroom, near the back of the school.  It’s more spacious than the rest of the classrooms. Windows there face the alley between the school and another building.  Their teacher, Hange, who hates the student-teacher dynamic, loves to joke about their luxurious view of the dumpsters.  Ymir thinks that after a few hundred times, a joke like that gets a little old.  The walls are the same creamy speckled color of the linoleum floors, paintings and paint plastered like postage stamps all over them.

Normally, the room is empty during the time homeroom should be happening.  For today, a single blond-haired kid with pink nails and short chubby fingers joins Ymir in the classroom.  He’s quiet, picking and choosing documents with words, all in the same, spiky lettering.  He has a pair of reading glasses on, black and round, that make his eyes look even larger and more luminous.  He doesn’t look like the sort of kid to miss homeroom, but Ymir sits across the room anyways, pretending she didn’t even spare him a glance.  

Time goes slowly, too slowly, and finally, finally, others stream in.  Footsteps, soft and overt and squeaking, fill the once quiet air.  In the light of the morning sun, dust settles and is thrown up again in a complicated dance, by the ever-moving bodies of others.  

From the thunderous hallway, a girl walks in, with a wide smile and teeth like perfect, fractured, glass shards.  Her eyes are blue like cornflowers and fog and tight around the corners.  Golden locks of fluffy hair float around her face like a halo, and Ymir looks away, fiddling with a pencil, trying to pretend she was never watching.  Eyes, like seawater, fall against her, burn her skin like frostbite.  Eyes, like snowflakes, kiss her cheeks and melt to liquid.

The classroom has very suddenly become too loud for Ymir’s taste.

"Could everybody please take out your sketchbooks? We'll be learning about the anatomy of hands and feet today, so please write the date down at the top of your paper."

Ymir looks up again, watching Hange twirl around tables like a storm.  Muscles suddenly tense, she scrambles through her battered backpack looking for her sketchbook.  It finds her hands, solid and sweet-smelling, watermarked and beaten.  Leaning over further, Ymir finds a red pen and stubby dandelion pencil rolling at the bottom of her backpack.  

The pages flutter like wings as she flips through them, looking for a new page to draw on.  Sketchy crosshatching flies across the pages, the rapid lines of a gesture, pages pockmarked with holes from too aggressive erasing.  Finally the blank white of a page faces her.  Nails with flaking black nail polish spread across it, smooth it down, feel the surface, memorizes the soft feeling.  And then, as Hange speaks, their hands flying like a whirlwind across the board, Ymir draws like she’s electric, charred, like a soft humid breath against sensitive skin.  Ymir draws like nothing can stop her.  Not people, not the words that wriggle beneath her skin like filthy maggots.  Like disease.  Like music, like blood, pumping, singing, to the cadence of her racing heart.  She draws like she can’t feel eyes on her.

She draws like she doesn’t know that shattered glass smile.

 

 

The sun, even during February, beats against Ymir's bruised body like a baseball bat.  Her skin is sticking to the seats in the car, and it doesn't help that her sister Soledad is sitting on her lap.  Her thighs are sticky too, and too thin.  When she fell into her lap earlier, exhausted from running and talking and playing, she hardly weighed anything.  Luis is sitting quietly, absentminded, between the passenger seat and the driver's seat.  Between his skinny knobby knees is the manual shift that their mother won't stop cussing at.  Normally, her mother is even-tempered, but today she is sadder than usual.  Her mom hates when her mascara is smeared by her tears.

There is luggage packed in the back, but it's hardly anything important.  Most of the clothing and items belong to Soledad and Luis.  Almost all of Ymir's clothes are packed, too, but she didn't have very many clothes in the first place. Ymir’s knee there's a single, peeling, almost skin tone band-aid.  In the middle there's a crimson stain like a flower, blooming in the heat.  She picks at it, tears it off and reapplies it, feeling the sting each time it's ripped from her skin.  Slowly it loses its stickiness and she stares forward instead, watching the buildings grow greyer and more tired.  She watches the people around her's faces grow darker.  

She cradles Soledad’s head in her palm, holding her against her chest.  She's warm.  She holds her head to her chest and hopes her steady heartbeat can be a substitute for the lullaby he was never sung.  

Slowly but surely, the sun falls beneath the distant horizon.  Soledad's head droops against Ymir, hair falling like a curtain over her face.  Lamps on every other corner and the occasional stoplight become the only illumination in a night blanketed by humidity.  Her mother keeps driving forward with a grim determination.  

Her mother's wide hands grip the steering wheel as tight as a clamp.  The bloody nose has clotted, her angry swollen left eye blossoms, mustard yellow and purple.  Her wrists are the same color.

She's so incredibly brave and admirable, she never lets anything hurt her, and Ymir wonders if she be her mother, instead of whoever she is now.  

Selfish.

Cowardly.

Hateful.

Crude.

She doesn't really feel anything but pity for her mother.  Like a rattle in her chest, her heart clatters and beats and rolls around, almost empty.  She isn't sympathetic, isn't sad that she might never see her father again, she is just awash in a horrible, sickening pity.  It’s no fault but her mother’s that they stayed with him for so long.  Maybe her mother felt some sort of obligation to Soledad, to stay with her daughter’s father and build their family a new foundation.  

Or maybe that's just what she tells herself in order to forget how much it hurt to see someone she loves beaten down like that, over and over again, by the world around her.  A facade she's made for herself. 

When they finally twist down a winding avenue and come to an abrupt halt in an alleyway next to an apartment building, her mother looks Ymir in the eyes for the first time that night.  

"This is your abuela's apartment, Ymir.  Take Luis and Soledad in.  I'll be up in a moment with our stuff.  Tell Abuela we'll be staying with her for a while.  

Ymir just nods, taking Luis into her arms and nudging Soledad awake.  She offers her hand and brings the two in with her, Soledad trailing along tiredly and Luis drooling on her shoulder.  Instead of waking him and pinching his little freckled cheeks like she might've yesterday, she just squeezes Soledad's hand a little harder.  

"She'll be in apartment 17, Ymir, first floor."  Again, with just a nod, she begins to walk towards the apartment complex.  There is no lobby, no smiling man to welcome them.  

When she reaches her abuela's door, Luis' knobby knees are almost knocking together and his hands are nearly slack in Ymir's.  He's wearing a small gray and black hooded jacket that’s too big for him.  It almost obscures his blue mesh shorts.  From within, metal clinks and turns and rubs against the inner workings of the door, and finally, when a chain clinks, the door is swung open to reveal her abuela's smiling wrinkled face.  

"Miri!" she cries, with all the enthusiasm she can muster.  She was once taller than Ymir, but now Ymir is the tall one, looking down at her grandmother from three inches above her.  

"Abuela," she answers in a flat tone.  She wants to be excited but this is all that she can do.

"Oh Miri you're so tall.  Stoic too, just like your father.  Come in, come in, I've got a place for you three."  Ymir scowls at her abuela behind her back.  It’s not fair that she can talk about her dad like that.  Her abuela shuffles in that grandmotherly way, robe-like night dress nearly dragging against she yellowing carpet.  It smells warm inside, like chile flakes and old wilted flowers.  

Soledad's heavy eyelids are drooping, her eyelashes almost brushing her slightly freckled cheeks.  Gathering him into her arms next to Soledad, Ymir follows her abuela with soft padding footsteps.  

The shuffling of abuela's footsteps comes to a stop, in front of a couch, scratchy looking and covered in crocheted blankets, quilts, and embroidered pillows.  A cross emblazons one of them, sweet reminders to pray are stitched across at least three small pillows, all stacked together neatly near the ends of the couch.  It's like her abuela sewed her heart and soul and bible into each of the pillows, one at a time, painstakingly pulling at her heartstrings to sew each stitch.  Again, and again, and again, and again, she ripped silken threads from her chest.

"This is it?"  Ymir asks, voice low and tired and almost disbelieving.  She doesn't really care how abuela reacts to her tone of voice, she just wants to go to sleep with Luis and Soledad curled around her.  

"What were you expecting, Miri?  A five star hotel?  Go to sleep and I'll talk to you in the morning."  Her tone is scolding but loving, the heat in her tone licking against Ymir's tired ears like flames.  

"M'kay," Ymir hums below her breath and sits down, untying her sibling's shoes and pulling off their tiny, tiny socks.  She leaves them in a pile on the pillow with a bible verse inscribed in petal pink embroidery.  " _The LORD is my strength and my shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped._ "  Ymir isn’t really one for advice.

Instead of sleeping on the couch, she drags the blankets from the cushions, watches the little pillows fall and bounce, and bounce, and come to a stop.  The carpet is even tougher and scratchier than the couch but there's more room to spread out her long arms, to pull her siblings close to her side.  She falls asleep next to them, feels their heartbeats next to hers, so terribly out of synch.  She falls asleep to the ticking off the cheap clock on the wall, ticking and ticking and ticking away at the seconds of February 16th.  

 

The carpet scratches her elbow raw.   It's all white and red and pink, exposed layers of skin sensitive against the rough surface.  She doesn't care enough to move.  Her mouth feels rough and grimy, like she swallowed dust.  Like something stale and grainy made its way down her throat.  It's terrible, terrible, all of it.  

All but the the warmth of her siblings latched to her side, a tangle of knobby knees and twisted, turning ankles.  Their tiny chests move up and down and they lay like fallen leaves, like discarded candy wrappers, wrapped in a collage of pastel colors and flowery patterns.

She loves them and it feels like there isn't any room for anything else in her heart.  She and her siblings are crammed in her cardboard box of a heart, enclosed and protected and scratching against each other to find some sort of freedom.  Ymir's love is suffocating, to her most of all.  And yet, somehow, she can always find the room to shove another in that cardboard box of a heart.  

Her heart is a cruel glass case of a thing, and all she wants to do is smash it, break it, feel the bite of the shards against her skin.  She is so incredibly tired of herself.  

Her mother's tiny feet pad against the floor in the doorway of this room, and Ymir pretends again that she's sleeping.  With all the tenderness and gentleness in the world, she feels her head lifted and placed in her mother's warm lap.  Her mother's thighs are thick and soft, warm with muscle and blood.  

 _There is love in her veins_ , Ymir thinks, and she wonders if her own heart was ever so full of others that she wasn't even her own person.  So full of love that her love of herself was hardly functional, would do nothing to save her from an angry man and his angry, angry ways.  She wonders and wonders, all to the sleepy beat of her own heart.  

"Ymir," she whispers, and it irritates Ymir, the way it clashes with the cadence of her rushing blood.

"Ymir," she says again, and Ymir opens a single eye halfway.  Her mother's eye is still swollen, still ugly and and angry and wrong.  Her mother is happy anyways.  As usual, she can't see past her own foggy curtain of sickening love.  

"Mm?"  She hums, struggling against the urge to go to sleep instead of listen.  Her mother is taking her hand in her own, and Ymir is reminded of how chubby and small and feminine her mother's hands are.  

"Feliz cumpleanõs."  She had forgotten.  Her birthday is today.  She was never hoping for a celebration, even wishes her mother didn't remember.  She's too tired, too cynical, to enjoy any party now.

"Gracias," she mutters, wishing she could go back to sleep.  Her siblings are stirring, thick eyelashes fluttering up and down.  She doesn't want to wake them up.  

"We're not going back," her mother whispers, abrupt and soft.  Ymir knew that anyways.  

"Okay," she answers, closing her honey colored eyes.  "Cool."

"I'll make you three some breakfast," she says, pushing Ymir's head from her lap as tenderly as she pulled it on.   Ymir wants to go back to sleep but Luis and Soledad are stirring on either side of her.  

She stands up instead, immediately noticing the chill of the apartment this early in the morning.  She wishes she hadn't stood up, but walks anyways.  Her feet, still in warm white cotton socks pad against the carpet, leading her to the bathroom.  The tile is dull and dirty looking, grime embedded within the grout.  

The mirror is cracked through the middle, one long fissure, straight through Ymir's reflection.  One side of her dark face is thinner and longer than the other.  It makes her look wrong and distorted and broken.  Her hair is flat and shiny over her forehead, but in the back it’s sticking up.  Weeks ago she cut it all with a pair of safety scissors out of impulse, and it's still scraggly and uneven around her angular face.  She hates it.  The hair on the back of her neck is shorn as short as she could cut it, and it looks sort of like some sort of sloppy undercut.  

God how she hates it, wishes she wasn't an idiot.  Her face is dark, the color of mahogany and sprinkled with stars, falling apart, exploding over her cheeks like supernovas.  

"Ymir?"  Her abuela calls her, and Ymir leaves the bathroom, almost grateful to not have to look at her own haggard face and chopped away hair.

"Mm?"  Ymir hums, picking at her ragged cuticles.  Her grandmother is standing in the hallway, between Ymir and the kitchen.

"How old are you now, dear? And Luis and Soledad, they are so big!"  She is shining with grand motherliness and good intentions.  She should be endearing, but all Ymir feels is boredom and irritation.

"Thirteen. Luis is six years old and Soledad is three."  She turns halfway, wanting to go back to the kitchen, to wake Luis and Soledad.  

"Thirteen? Well that explains that ridiculous haircut," she titters to herself, laughs and smiles at her own joke.

"Yeah."  Ymir wants to leave.  "Okay."  

"Ymir," her abuela says, her voice ringing with pity.  Ymir hates it, hates it, hates it.  "You and your siblings should sleep in the guest room instead of the floor.  You poor things deserve at least that."  Ymir wants to snarl and hiss and rip things apart at that remark.  Her grandmother’s words irritate her for no reason at all.

"Yeah, okay."  Ymir maneuvers around her abuela, heading for the kitchen.  

"Lávate las manos,"  her mom says, rinsing her own hands under the lukewarm water.  

"'Kay," Ymir mutters, shuffling in next to her mother.  The water runs through her skinny jointed fingers like tears, streaming, rushing over her bruised and scabbed knuckles.  Her hands are dripping, moist, cold.  

"Ymir!"  Luis says from his place at the table.

"Did you wash your hands, you little booger?"  Ymir asks, smirking and coming at him with her soaked hands.

"Yep!"  He smiles like sunshine.

She smiles like red hot magma and sharp, shattered obsidian.  

"Guess I'll just give you a little shower, then," she laughs, flicking water droplets at him.  

"'Mir!" He shouts, laughing, jumping from his seat and runs to grab her bare leg.  His chubby hands, still dripping, clap against her freckled skin

"Aha!"  She chuckles, gripping him under his armpits and setting him down on his chair, the tallest of the ones sitting around the tiny round table.  Softly flicking his forehead, Ymir sits next to him.  

"You're getting so big," Ymir laughs, running her fingers over her shirt to dry them.

"You're the one who's getting big, you know," her mother said, and Ymir looks away.  

"Yeah.  I guess," she says, hoping the moist spots on her shirt would dry soon.  They feel cold and plastered against her skin.

"Your abuela said you and Luis and Soledad can have the room I slept in last night.  Think of it as a birthday gift."  Her mom is smiling, tender, soft.  

"I'll check it out, then," she mutters, looking away and taking long strides toward the room.  She sidesteps her abuela, who looks like she wants to speak to her.   

The room is down a creamy colored hall, the walls a little uneven and almost pinkish in some spots.  It looks like some sort of uneven, splotchy, expanse of hairless skin and Ymir looks at the dirty carpet instead.  

It ends quickly though, the hall being only a few feet, and the room coming closer and closer.  Inside, it's small, with a mattress sitting on the floor, covered neatly by sheets and quilts, made and put together.  There's a closet across from the bed, small and just barely cracked.

The most interesting part are the flowers everywhere, falling out of vases, pressed and pinned on the walls, wilting and blooming, decadent and decomposing.  They make the room smell slightly fresh, none of them too aromatic to overwhelm Ymir.  She likes it, the warm, safe, environment they produce.  She wonders if Luis and Soledad would too.  

The closet looks wrong, cracked open.  It feels like the closet is out of context in this bedroom.  Ymir steps soundlessly towards it, wonders what could possibly be inside.  When she opens it, stale air and the scent of chili powder, cinnamon, and the faintest scent of vanilla hit her. There's old rolls of wrapping paper against the back corner and a sewing machine with a rusty, dull needle.  There aren't any flowers here.  It's like a tiny, tiny, grave.  Like a grave for an old and forgotten woman, with nobody to leave anything for her.  

Forgotten, rotting, falling apart, Ymir pushes it aside, and there's a tiny shoebox beneath it all, covered by dust and an unfinished quilt.  The smiling faces of comic children state out at her, amidst sunflowers and dripping, grotesque color.  

The shoebox has peeling stickers on it.  Flowers, suns, stars, they all pass away together on the cardboard box, a box like a tiny coffin.  Ymir reaches out to open it, and is greeted by bubbly handwriting that moves and jumps about the page like electricity, collapsing against itself and burning, sizzling, destroying itself.  

She shuts it instead of tearing through it, reluctant to pervert the melancholy soaking in the back of her new closet.

She leaves.  She walks into the kitchen and hoists her sister up, she laughs and glares and screams from a deep crater in her chest, dips her fingers into the swirling, lapping pool in her stomach.  Ymir does not have time for things like this.  Or so she tells herself.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> newly revised chapter... also! please ignore where this and other chapters overlap... it's all coming together!


	3. New Beginnings, Old Faces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Historia manages to hate herself more than anybody. The only warmth she finds in her life is in the kindness of others. Ymir is a sibling with a heart of gold.

_**3.** _

 

**New Beginnings, New Faces**

 

 

Historia wonders what it's like at her old High School.  Whether Reiner and Annie ever missed her presence, if they ever still think about her.  She doesn't really think of them, not outside of isolated incidents such as this one.  She wonders if that makes her a bad person.  She doesn't think of the past much, she doesn't let the taste of earth and vanilla linger on her tongue for more than a second.

"Historia?"  

Her name grabs her and drags her from her own poisonous mind.  What a funny turn of events, to have her name, her antiquated mockery of a name, save her.

"Here," she calls out, before looking back down, at her nails, too pink and too perfect.  Her hair curls before her eyes and hides her in a curtain of lethargy and sunshine.  

"Hey," a voice says from next to her, calm and quiet.  Ice chips and peppermint drops fill her ears and throat and nose, and she looks towards the speaker.

"Hey," she answers, flashing a half smile.  "How are you?"  

"I'm okay," the girl next to her speaks in a breathy, half exhale.  "I missed my bus and had to get a ride from Armin.  And he drives like his grandfather."  Her voice is warm, like a hand against your own in the cold.

Lips curved upwards, breathing out, Historia laughs and Mikasa does too, just a little bit.  Mikasa, by her side, feels firm and calm and everything Historia wants and needs.

"Did he have to drive Eren, too?" She asks, and she already knows the answer."

"Yeah.  He can't use his moms car after he got that ticket."  Mikasa's lips are upturned, the faint freckles on her cheeks like stars.  Historia remembers Mikasa telling her, in her own quiet, firm, way about it.

Historia doesn't full out laugh, just blows air from her mouth and looks down.  Mikasa is still smiling, and Historia feels a smile, a real smile, she thinks, grace her lips.  They turn their heads forward and sit in a companionable silence.  Hushed whispers come from the front of the room, from the teacher and from the students and from the squeak of sneakers against linoleum.  The clock is loud, louder than most clocks.  With each tick, she can hear the low budget, with each tock she can feel time sliding down her rosy cheeks like tears.  Saltwater, seawater, sewage, the sweet taste of icy water.  

When they are dismissed, Historia sends a smile towards Mikasa, murmuring a goodbye.  She has Art first, Theatre, English, Math, Biology, and History.  The bland classes march onward in a melancholy, macabre manner, and Historia wonders whether she is supposed to care at all.  

The hallways feel like drowning, in noise and in voices and the quiet squeaks of rubber against linoleum flooring, the sound of laughter like a saving grace.  She smiles at anyone she locks eyes with, quiet and subtle and glowing with manufactured fluorescent light.  

"Hey," they say.  Somebody comes to walk next to her, steps falling in tune with Historia's.

"Hey, Sasha."  Historia's face feels a little warm under the sunny gaze and smile, dripping like brown sugar from her mouth.  Her eyes are brown, like oak, like syrup, like sweetness.  Bags under her eyes hang like vines from the boughs of maplewood trees.  The freckles on her cheeks fall against her skin like withered leaves.  

"How's art going?  Have you painted this era's Mona Lisa yet?  A regular Pablo Picasso?"  She asks, with all the shocking warmth of a Slurpee left in the sun for too long.

"I've drawn a few stick figures," she admits quietly.  "They're sort of shaded?"  

"Michelangelo didn't paint the Sistine Chapel when he was seventeen.  Give it some time."  She claps a hand against Historia's shoulder and smiles so genuinely, like icing on her lips, like she can give those smiles out without care.  Historia smiles just a bit, rolling her eyes away from the other girl.  

"Of course, Sasha," she speaks to her honey sweet companion.  

"Anytime, sunshine."  Historia thinks Sasha is the one who's sunshine, who smiles like it's easy, who wakes her up from a deep depressive sleep.  She wants to laugh at the thought that she warms anyone's skin.  More like she burns it raw.  

"Bye," Historia says before turning in to the art room.  Her shoulder clips the olive corner of the wall, shaking and vibrating her pencils.  They roll around, against eachother, falling together.  The fluorescent light of the classroom is a shock.  Bright white light bounces off of creamy off-white walls, illuminating the numerous creations lining the walls.  Pots almost fall over eachother on shelves and cabinets, spilling and overflowing like a muddy red and black and tie dyed wave.  The walls are bright and dark and blinking, still faces and tired eyes, colors dripping from nails and mouths and the dying hands of soldiers, all meshed, macabre and marvelous.  

In the corner a girl with honey eyes watches her, watches her face and movements and body.  She looks tired and unkempt but also like warmth.  The girl in the corner, she thinks, knows far more of life than she ever has.  Under her starry smile and skin like acorns, she is wise and old and beautiful, she thinks.  

Historia feels like she's too different from the girl, like a diamond with a frozen glassy heart.  Instead of crying, she sits down at her seat.

"Hey Armin."  He's shuffling through papers, through people, through pencils, as though his life depends on it.  Blonde hair blotchy cheeks, he looks up and she sees the piercing blue of his eyes, bluer and colder than Historia's heart.  

"Historia," he says.  "How are you?"  Even as he looks at her, his hands won't stop moving.  It's like his mind is somewhere else, on a higher plane than anyone can comprehend.  

"I'm as good as ever."  His eyes are like icebergs, sloughing into the ocean.  

"So, not good?"  Armin asks, and the ice of his irises crack and shatter and splinter Historia's frosty skin.  

"No," she almost snaps, almost lets that icy water fall from her mouth.  "No, I'm good.

"Ok," he murmurs back.  Historia wants to tear at his fluffy blond hair and stick her fingers down his throat so he'll vomit all the cold snowy secrets he knows about her.  

Her fingers twitch and fidget and she wonders how she became so full of such senselessness.

The teacher walks in, and Historia stills her thoughts.  

Hange is an explosion of saccharine and wine, like dark chocolate and cookie dough in a senselessly small body.  They're a singularity, full of everything and nothing at all, terribly heavy in a cloud of nothingness.  

"Could everybody please take out your sketchbooks? We'll be learning about the anatomy of hands and feet today, so please write the date down at the top of your paper."  Taking a pause to sip their coffee, Hange strolls through the room, weaving between people and tables and paint splatters.  Like always, they wear a loose white t-shirt and loose black pants.  They're covered with paint, dotted with faint dustings of chalk and pastels.  The white shirt is the same, covered in handprints and smears.  The splatters are different every day, but Hange's personality never changes.   They command attention and bleed inspiration, their heart moves paint and tears and love through their bloodstream.  She is an enigma to Historia.  

Historia draws in her sketchbook, watching the firm strokes and clever shading of Armin's hand next to her, struggles to make her hand move in ways it hasn't before.  Instead of pondering on the actions of Hange and Armin and the strange, strange ways they work, Historia watches the girl in the corner, and the girl in the corner watches back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I stopped writing this somewhere around where Ymir's POV begins and began writing recently. It's a very clear break, I think. Looking back, I believe the biggest influences on my ever-changing writing style have been "A Guide To Being Born" by Ramona Ausbel, my fifth re-read of Fahrenheit 451, and whatever re-read I'm on now of aradian-nights' "Vigilantia Pretium Libertatis". All worth the read and all incredible in terms of figurative language. Please enjoy!


	4. Metal Garden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Historia is breaking apart faster than she thought. Ymir pretends she can't tell. (warning for panic attack and extreme anxiety, past spousal abuse, and gory/violent imagery)

_**4.** _

 

**Metal Garden**

 

 

Ymir and her siblings don't go to school for a few weeks.  They don't really leave their abuela's apartment either, just sit around and sleep and dream hazy dreams while their mother commutes to her old job as a waitress at Olive Garden, an hour and a half away by car.  At the same time she tries to find a new job closer to abuela's apartment.  

After about two weeks being stifled under her abuela and the stench of wilted flowers, Ymir leaves the apartment alone, wearing a loose tank top and a pair of basketball shorts, black and mesh, that she thinks used to be her dad's.  She has a backpack too, only one strap slung over her shoulder.  It's heavy with the featherweight of something Ymir doesn't want to think about, not quite yet.

It's hot on that day too, the winter sun like a mace, the air not quite humid, but enough to irritate Ymir.  Almost everything irritates her, from the weather to her mother to her own bedroom, which smells like rotting and decay.  

The alien flakes of paint bounce as she almost runs down the stairs, one, two, three steps at a time.  It's like falling, she thinks.  

There are dandelions in the patch of grass in the front, the once puffy, white blossoms stripped of material.  They look sad, like the tired tiny heads of people.  Ymir brushes past them, giving them nary a thought, instead looking for some blessed place to be alone with herself and her thoughts.   

The asphalt sparkles in the sunlight, like diamonds, like cheap rhinestones, and Ymir steps as forcefully as she can on each cheerful spot of light.  Black, cheap, thrift store shoes come crashing down, with a flab of rubber sticking to the pavement for an instant before following the rest of the shoe.  

The asphalt comes to a stop and yields to the dust and pebbles of a playground, founded by a nearby church.  It looks rusted, diseased, and Ymir can't wait to make it her own.  Nobody is around, all gone to school, and Ymir sits on a swing.  It creaks a little under her weight, her pitiful weight, but nevertheless swings as it should.

Near the swingset there’s a shiny metal slide, worn from countless children scaling and tumbling down it, landing in the dust and hardness of the ground.  Maybe Luis and Soledad would like this place.  

Ymir stops her line of thought and instead gives herself a tiny push of her swing.  She sways back and forth calmly and reaches into her tired black backpack.  There's nothing but a tiny cardboard box, faded, dying, decomposing like the flowers in her room.  

With steady hands, she opens it.  The paper within shudders in Ymir's shadow, moving as though a new life has been breathed into them.  The box is nearly full of papers, from receipts to photographs to letters in that same falling apart handwriting she saw earlier.   The first paper Ymir fishes out is a photograph.   It's a girl, tiny, blonde and blue, standing next to a short woman with wavy hair and a thick-lipped smile.  They look so alive, standing together as if they complete one another, perfect.  Too perfect, Ymir thinks, to be standing in front of the same apartment she lives in.  

The girl's hair is fluffy and wild, shining like gold in the sun.   She looks so joyful Ymir wants to look away, shut the box, but instead, she drops the photo back in and picks up a receipt instead.   

It details a purchase from Walgreens.  Five packs of Trident gum, wintergreen.  A can of pinto beans.  Suave shampoo, 50% off.  Boring, useless, she thinks, and drops it too.  

Her fingers, knobby, invasive, finally find something worth reading.  It's a letter, with destructive, bubbly, handwriting.   The deliberate movements are made in unsharpened pencil.  

_Dear Ana,_

_Today in school we had to write about someone important to us.  I chose you.   Nobody knew who you were or why you were so special, but that's okay, because the rest of my fourth grade class all chose their moms or their dads or the brothers.  I didn't know any of them either.  I stapled the assignment to this note, I hope you read it._

 Indeed, it was attached, folded so it could fit in the box.  

_One of the most important people in my life is a nice girl named Ana.  She has wavy hair and two birthmarks, one right under her chin and the other on the tip of her nose.  She also smells like vanilla and cinnamon and makes me soup that tastes better than the canned stuff._

_The reason she is important is because she is smart and loving.  Even though she has a family, she takes care of me too.  She is smart because she reads a lot of poetry to me and can name all the bones in my hand.  She is very important to me because of these reasons, and I love her._

The name at the top is Historia, no last name, written in the same shaky handwriting as the rest of the paper.  Electric, eclectic, elated, the words shatter against eachother.  

Ymir wonders why this girl, Historia, would leave all this stuff here, with her.  She wonders at the gold encrusted threads of her hair, she thinks and wonders and reads.   She devours knowledge with her hands and eyes and mouth, breathing out words that suffocate and comfort like a down pillow.  Tanned, taut fingers memorize the softness of the papers, and the bitter nostalgia that belongs to Historia, not Ymir, pressed into the paper.  

Ymir tears at Historia's mark on the world, laughing and devouring with an incomparable voracity. Satiated, she walks back to her house, with a few parasitic, bald  flowers clenched in her fingers to replace the rot and wretchedness of the flowers at home.  She walks until she forgets, and then remembers it all over again.   

 

 

Ymir puts off talking to Historia for another day.  She walks carelessly from art, doesn't spare Historia another glance.  Or she pretends she doesn't.   The icy blue kiss of her eyes feels like frostbite, and Ymir obsessively convinces herself that she doesn't care, shouldn't care, about whoever she is.  

Historia.  That's who she is.  Golden-haired, a princess, she's heard, one heralded by an icy, frozen white King.  Rod Reiss, that goddamned Senator, just happens to be her stepdad.  And Ymir just happens to know Historia better than anybody else.  

The box, that tiny coffin, is still in her closet, covered by its unfinished quilt shroud. Sometimes she flips through it, sitting on a decrepit swingset, when she can't stop herself from devouring that coveted, glistening childhood.  It's not the worst of Ymir's habits, but she feels like some sort of pervert.  She drinks in the dreams of a nine year old girl and vomits whatever it is her life is in its place.  

The halls move too fast and the clock is torturously slow, so Ymir decides to go somewhere, anywhere, away from school.  The hallways are so empty so soon.  Students trickle out like water from a nearly empty jug.  Soon, Ymir and other stragglers are the only ones, black, rubber soled thrift store sneakers smacking and sticking just a bit against the discolored linoleum.  She passes classrooms, most shut and hushed.  Right next to the back door of the school is the gymnasium, heavy metal doors wide open like the gaping maw of some hungry beast.  

The gym is filled, with an amalgamation of freshman and others who didn't take gym their first year.   Historia is standing in there, shirt just a little too big on her 4'9" frame, the normal gym shorts replaced by much shorter knit red ones.   The regulation ones must have been too large.  She's in a crowd of others, laughing, but she hardly cracks a smile.  A real smile.  The one she has now looks vacant.  Ymir doesn't want to watch her, falling apart, tearing herself apart by the joints of her pretty little body.  She pretends she does not care.  

Historia is gone, seconds after Ymir sees her, like she was never there, and soon, so is Ymir.  She steps out of the building, maneuvers around the broken glass and crumpled cans of the alley next to the school.  She kicks a crumpled aluminum can spitefully and ambles towards her car.  It's not a very long walk, the school being a bit of a squat brick of a thing, and Ymir reaches the parking lot soon enough.  The asphalt is just a little warm by now, soon to become a furnace.  The hole in her shoes seems to soak up the heat, like little sparks burning her worn feet.  

Humming just a bit to some tuneless beat, Ymir knocks her scabbed knuckles against the dent in the door of the truck.  It echoes it’s metallic beat back to her as she pulls the door open and steps in to the vehicle.  Her long legs fold like a tattered photograph in a back pocket.  

Sitting behind the steering wheel, Ymir looks out at the parking lot around her.  Most of the cars look like they’re older than the people who drive them.  They’re dented or scratched or smeared with the weird splotchiness of dead bugs, or a combination of all three.  The lines separating the cars are worn, white, chalky, some of them almost gone, some half reapplied and standing out like some sort of flag of surrender.  Ymir starts feeling cramped in the tiny parking lot.  It hardly has enough spaces for the few people that actually come to school.  Pileups, Ymir thinks, cars crammed together like a bouquet, people falling apart as fast as their cars, if everyone who was supposed to come to school actually came.  It’s funny how even the teachers hope that kids won’t come to school, in the hopes that their classrooms won’t be overflowing with apathetic children.

Not children, not adults, just some sort of Frankenstein’s monster combination of the two.  Old enough to drive, too young to leave the room without asking for permission.  What a funny tightrope Ymir and everyone in school walked.

Ymir doesn’t want to think about it anymore.  She pulls out of the parking space with a practiced ease and drives away from the cement block of a school.  As she enters the push and pull of traffic it feels like the bags under her eyes are pulling her down.  Her eyelashes are like anvils against her leaf covered sooty cheeks.

On the radio, there’s some sort of talk show playing.  An obnoxiously pitched woman giggles at her cohost, a man with an unfathomably deep voice.  Ymir pretends, for just a moment, that they’re right there next to her.  Her hands scrabble against old tinny radio almost immediately and turn it off, preferring to bathe in the poison of her own thoughts, rather than that web those voices could weave.

The road slowly filters out the other cars, leaving Ymir the lone driver.  She doesn't realize where her hands are taking her until the sun hits her eyes and she realizes it's noon.  She's been driving for so long, and she's nearly where she unconsciously set out for.   The pavement is riddled with gum and weeds pushing their parasitic heads from the sidewalk.  The neighborhood itself is no better, she thinks.  Somehow she's ended up near the apartment that she shares with her mother and siblings, despite having driven only for the act of it. 

Maybe it was just her stepfather, set in his stonecut ways.  Maybe it was her mother, drowning herself in love.   Maybe it was the way that girl in her class' hair bounced, up and down and side to side, who always caught Ymir staring at her legs.   What a fool she had been.  What a fool she is.  

Her stepfather isn't here anymore, of course.  Probably fucking another woman in some faraway motel.  Maybe hitting her too, bruising her knuckles in his manacle like grip.  

For just a second, Ymir thinks she can see red roses blooming around her wrists, mottled and eaten away with purple and yellow.  Her knuckles, twisting and turning in a bathtub full of clear water, leaving behind a veil of red blood, the scent of something like cologne and anger and sweat.  Luis' oily coarse hair, curling in summer heat under her knobby fingers.  Her face, her eyes, bags so deep they felt like they were dragging against the floor.

Panic, that was her first feeling, she thinks, upon meeting her stepfather.  Married and forcibly divorced by death, her mother had fled a loving marriage for a facsimile of one.  Love, she always spoke of, like she held it in her hands and strung it through her pretty dark hair.   Love, she spoke of, even when hands, coarse with skin and hair, light, lighter than Ymir's, pulled at her mama's bruised wrists.

Relief, she is sure, is the last time she saw him.  Passing him, dozing on the couch with a box of cereal and a plaid shirt with ripped sleeves exposing the red skin of his back, hairy and disgusting.  His nose was crooked and his hair was buzzed unevenly.  It used to be brown, stringy, greased back.  When her mama met him Ymir likes to imagine drunken kisses and a dance straight out of a movie.  He was suave, she thinks, took her arm and dribbled sweet nothings down her throat like molasses.  She likes to pretend he was human.  

 

 

All Historia wanted to do was melt in her desk under the sun steaming through the window.  She would circle the drain in the middle of the science room, her particles collecting under the uneven tiles.  She would leave footprints and chromosomes under the desks and stick to people's shoes.  She would be anywhere but here.  

Historia can't do that, and neither can she care. She listens to the drone of speech, something about equations, something she writes in her notebook in bubbly handwriting.

Sasha and Connie and Jean are going to want to pick through her notes later, under the illusion that they're comparing.  They're not.  They'll be cramming for a test they learned about the day before.  Armin and Mikasa and Eren are going to ask her to study with them.  Armin and Mikasa will try to get Eren to care and Historia will play along.  Her eyes will follow the outline of Mikasa's bra through her shirt and the slanting cursive hand of Armin's.  She'll try to study it and doodle in the margins instead.  Stars.  Flowers.  Freckles.  Hands, moving like machinery, lips, moving like mourners to the beat of some otherworldly tune.  She'll pass the test, she'll go home and she'll fall asleep with dewdrops and rain clouds in her heart.  

Earlier that day, Historia had seen Ymir leave the school through the back door next to the gym.  When she noticed her, she turned away as fast as she could, smiling at some freshman boy.  He laughed and she laughed back too.  These days her laugh sounded less like the tinkling of chimes and more like the rattle of bones in a tin box.  These days? These past few years? The entirety of her life?  

Ymir's legs are stardusted and covered with hair, dark and, Historia imagines, coarse.  Slipping her right hand beneath her desk, she touches her own skin.  Her legs look like they're half as long as Ymir's.  

The way Ymir looks at her feels like needles, prodding, pricking against her skin and leaving tiny droplets of blood.  Her gaze feels like a tongue, pressed against the pad of her finger, sweeping the blooming Crimson away.  She hates it.  

It feels like Ymir's gaze melts her tiny ice heart.  Just like Armin.  She hates how they just know, and yet do nothing.  She hates how they could rip her apart with those woven words.  It's strange how much power others have over her.  Her pretty pink nails would be ripped out, ragged and bloody, before she would want someone to dislike her.  What a selfish girl, living on the love of others, and yet giving none.  Ymir and Armin, she thinks, are threats, nothing more.  She hasn't found herself caring about something this much in a long while.  

Of course, at another time she craved this awareness of others.  She abhorred the thought of being unknown to everyone but herself.  Now, she craves the anonymity.  

Her hand smears the blue ink of her pen.  It stains the fleshy side, like a bruise.  She wants to wash it off, like she wants to do to Ymir and Armin.  Brush their eyes away with a wave of a hand.  Watch them, swirl down the drain in reds and yellows and blues.  

Her hand stills for a moment as she looks out the window and wonders if she can see Ymir's car in the parking lot.  How small she feels, how dirty she feels on the inside, like some sort of stalker.  God, what a leech she is.  She lives off blood and smiles and love, sucking it and never doing anything with it.  

The bell rings.  It echoes and echoes inside of her head.  Rattling like a half empty tin of mints.  Her hands scrabble across papers and pens and pencils, throwing them together and pulling them into her arms.  

That feeling in her chest is there again.  Pounding against her ribcage.  Resting in her lungs like ice cubes.  

She feels a hand on her shoulder.  Warm.  Comforting.  She wants to fling it away and fall against it at the same time.   What a strange, terrible girl she is.  She hums in the direction of the owner of the hand, hoping it's who she wants it to be.  

"Historia," a voice speaks, like caramel candies and sticky, slow, molasses.  

"Sasha,"  she answers, smiling in what she hopes in a shy manner.  She doesn't want to part her lips over her chattering teeth, out of fear of feeling them all crumble and crack from the lies that push against them every day.  

"Do you have any food?"  Sasha asks, hand still on Historia's shoulder, smile still as crooked as Historia's hear.  Historia decides to lean in.  

"Not right now.  You want my granola bar at lunch?"  She doesn't like the stickiness of granola caught in her teeth.  

"You know it," Sasha answers with a wide toothy smile, swinging her arm around Historia's.  Historia looks away and laughs a bit.   Sasha is so much taller than her, she feels so solid and warm and wrong and she wants to drink in that warmth.

"Did I hear something about an extra granola bar?" He looks like his voice, all sugar and lemon heads.  Skittles, she thinks as he comes around to her other side.  

"Fuck off Connie, Historia likes me better," Sasha laughs.  She flicks him softly on his shoulder with the hand wrapped around Historia.  

"I have enough to share."  Sasha looks at Historia, grinning and a little dopey.  Her eyes are sprinkled, coated, sugary, they bounce off of Historia's diamond skin.  

"God, Historia, you're too nice.  If you keep catering to freeloader over here," Sasha looks pointedly at Connie, eyes comically narrowed.  What a shame, Historia thinks, to hide such lovely eyes.  "You're gonna get even smaller and he's not gonna be able to fit through those cafeteria doors."

Sasha slides her arm off of Historia's shoulder and laughs, and so does Historia, with Connie giggling to her side.  She closes her eyes, feels just Sasha's lingering warmth and Connie next to her, arm hitting hers occasionally as he walks too energetically, trades looks and laughs with Sasha.  She wants to be them.  

"Fuck off, Braus," Connie laughs, eyes like sunlight and dirty pond water wrinkled just a bit in the corner with laughter lines, faint, like charcoal on a plain piece of paper.  

"Not around the children," Sasha gasps in mock horror, hands cupping Historia's ears.  Her eyes are wide, eyelashes long and dark.  "She's too pure."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," he answers, eyes just as wide and sincere.  "Go away, asshole.  Better?”  Sasha is about to answer but he turns, abruptly, waving goodbye and walking into his classroom.  Sasha laughs, and turns to look at Historia again.  Historia looks from Sasha’s smiling face to her shoes.  It’s too bright for her to look at.

“I’ve gotta run, too, sunshine,” Sasha laughs, turning a few steps after Connie had.  Historia’s smile fades and her gate slows and she suddenly doesn’t feel like anything.  She’s featherlight and blowing away, her feet are like roots and her sinews are snapping and curling like string.  She’s nothing, she’s everything, she can’t be here anymore.

There's something familiar in her chest, panic, some sort of terrible suffocation.  She feels like a teddy bear stuffed too full.  She feels like she's being ripped apart.

Her feet retrace what she thinks was Ymir’s route outside of the building,  She imagines footprints in the linoleum like imprints in the snow.  She’s running now, binders and papers and pencils held against her chest.  She watches the prints form before her very eyes.  They’re made by black sneakers, worn.  The smack of rubber feels like a slap to her face and she’s flying, she’s drowning, she’s buffeted by all the people around her.  

She shuts the heavy black door like it was never open.  She’s still running, flying, she’s crying. smeared red cheeks, she’s breathing like she’s dying, her heart is close to bursting, and she runs.  She runs, she runs, her feet tracing something like a path.  

Her heart is pouring out through the cracks in her ribcage.  Red and blue and white, tiny snowflakes, they cascade from her chest and they stain her shoes.  Her tears aren’t tears, they’re sheets of ice sloughing off a glacier.  She’s not a person she’s the wind, and she’s blowing herself into oblivion.

That pain in her chest is intensifying but she keeps on running.  She’s acutely aware of the pain in her legs, that floating, clenching feeling, but not of where she’s going.  

“Oh.”

Oh, she thinks, she breathes heavily, throat clenching and unclenching, saliva filling her mouth.  It’s sort of salty, that taste, like seawater, she thinks, or soup.  It’s gone as she stumbles and heaves, falls to her hands and knees and vomits across the black asphalt.  It’s like stars and galaxies against the black.  Her wrist is stinging, having slipped from the curb and tearing the skin.  Her palm and wrist is all bloody and dangerously close to the contents of her stomach, laying there like a brown and white and nauseating puddle.  She remembers rainboots and ponchos and rainy days, warm rain like a kiss, and jumping in the collected water.  She’s hit by a disgusting urge to do the same.  She catches another whiff of the retch and chokes.  She’s on her hands and knees. She’s falling apart and all she hopes is that her father won’t know.

Looking around wildly, she realizes where she had been running.  She’s as broken as he neighborhood around her and she wants to dig her nails deep in the exposed flesh of her bloody wrist and pull herself apart from the inside.  She’s disgusting, she’s sentimental, she’s back at her old apartment.

No.  It’s not hers.  Home before Rod was an abstract concept.  A person, a voice speaks, steamy breath making her stomach leap in a horrifying way.  

Ana. Ana, Ana, Ana, Ana, Ana, Ana.

She whimpers to herself and scratches her tearstained cheeks.  She’s in a daze. she’s not the right person, she’s not Historia.  She’s selfish and sarcastic and she’s, she’s, she’s real.  

Her hands scrabble against the pavement and she jumps to her feet, begins walking away.  Nobody’s around, she realizes.  She’s run herself into a backstreet.  There’s dirt and filth all of over her knees and hands.  She’s aching everywhere.  Inside and out, she’s ripped herself apart.  Oh how funny, how even she, in all her brokenness, is the one who really destroys herself.

She lets herself think clearly about things.  Down the street there’s a playground, with a metal slide, shiny like tears, and a swingset.  She used to swing there and laugh there and love there. she used to hold herself together by the seams of her skin and sew herself back together.  She used to be nothing, nothing, nothing.  

The playground is worse than she remembers it.  It’s still a tired metal garden sprouting from hard cement.  She can’t count the times she’d fallen and skinned her palms raw.  She stoops and feels the sting of the dirt and the blood and the rawness of teared flesh.

It’s the first time she notices someone else.  Clutching her hand to her chest and moistening her finger to wash away the black marks on her face, she turns away, pretends she’s normal.  

“Were you crying?” A voice asks.  It’s flat and grating and feels like reality.  The swingset creaks and rubber soled shoes clap against the cement, and Historia knows who it is.

“No,” she says, still turned away, still hunched over.  She slowly rises as she hears the groan of the metal as the other girl jumps down.  Ymir, she thinks, and she feels like crying all over again.

Her footsteps are featherlight behind Historia, almost nothing, but Historia can gear the bated breath and shuffling of clothes.  

Black shoes stop before her.  The brand name is so dusty and worn that she can’t read a thing.  She doesn’t look up, doesn’t want to think.  She just stares at the skinny ankles and shoes, tightens her grip around her bloody palm.  It stings, sticky hot and burning.

“Whatever you say,” Ymir answers.  She sounds bored and walks back to the swingset.  

Historia feels like throwing a punch and running away and sitting next to her on the swingset all at the same time.  She decides on the latter, pushing her feet lightly against the cement to propel herself into the air just a little.  Ymir sits next to her.  She doesn’t swing, she doesn’t speak, and Historia feels just a little bit better.  She decides she hates herself more than she hates Ymir.  She wonders if she doesn’t hate Ymir, if it’s just the first time she’s felt anything for longer than a few weeks that wasn’t hatred or anxiety.  She wonders if the heat in her gut and the electricity coursing through her brittle bones is something she’s never felt before.  

And then she thinks that she has felt it before, and that scares her even more.

Ymir doesn’t look at Historia but Historia looks at her.  She’s all angles and sharp turns and she wants to break her apart and piece her back together.  She wants to know what makes her tick.

She wants to know exactly what color her eyes are.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Christmas very much hinders how fast I write. I'll update sooner next time. Please comment if your have any critiques or suggestions. :)


	5. Tastes Like Bile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Historia: tired, selfish, trying to put herself together. She sews her limbs together like she sews cotton skirts for Sunday Mass.
> 
> Ymir: her heart is a box and she thinks she might be suffocating herself in it

_**5.** _

 

**Tastes Like Bile**

 

 

The worst thing about living with your abuela is when she dies.  A month after Ymir's fifteenth birthday she has a succession of strokes.  Her last one ends in a coma.  At fifty seven years old, her abuela has married twice, had seven children, and seen four of them die.  

Her mom doesn't want to pull the plug.

Ymir does it for her.  

She pretends to cry for her mom's sake.

"Mom," she whispers, "we don't have the money."

"Ymir," her mom puts her hands behind Ymir's neck and the tough skin scratches her.  "Love doesn't have a pricetag."

"Our apartment does.  Luis and Soldedad's food does.  Everything has a pricetag.  Life has a pricetag.  We will be nothing, nothing without that money." Ymir wants  to shake her mother til she sees sense.  How terrible to be suffocated by love.  

"We will be nothing without love, mija," she mutters.  She closed her eyes.  Ymir sits in the waiting room as her mother filled out the paperwork.  Luis and Soledad sit, somber, like funeral goers.  This would be the only one abuela would have.  

Her mother has to be in the room when it happens.  Someone else could've done it but she feels like she has to be there.  She holds abuela's hand as she dies, and Ymir wonders what that felt like.

She wants to stop her mother from hurting herself.  She wants to take all her mother's love for others and break it over her knee.  

"We only need eachother," she whispers into Soledad's hair that night.  They couldn't sleep alone so Ymir has joined them on the bed, long limbs curled to wrap around them.  It's too warm.  

She shakes her head against Ymir's lips, smooth, brown, soft.  Ymir hugs her closer.

"No," Soledad whispers.  

Her heart feels empty now.  Suffocating.  Like a tomb.

 

 

Ymir opens her eyes as she hears the creak and groan of a swingset.  Metal clinks and feet pad against the ground, walking away.  The sun is hot in the sky and Ymir's skin feels like a stuffy outer shell.  

Historia is walking away.  The black streaks by her eyes are crumbly, like tiny gritty pencil shavings.  It's a slow, defeated type of walk.  Her hair is all swept behind her shoulders, a mess of gold.  Her hand swings against her thigh, all raw and wrong.  

It still smells a little like vomit.  

Historia wears it like a perfume as she trudges, away, away, away, like an animal dragging a bitten away limb from a claw like trap.  

Ymir raises a knobby hand to salute her bye, smirking, eyes glowing in the afternoon sun.  Historia looks back, and it's the first time they make eye contact in that playground.  

She waves back.  The smile she tries to flash is strained.  It looks like there are stitches pulling her lips apart, strings of a puppeteer keeping her lidded eyes from closing altogether.  They're cold and Ymir feels a shiver run up her spine.  

Historia turns and she's gone.  Her footsteps echo against the walls of the alley near the playground, faltering but on the right path.  

Ymir looks away, at her dusty black sneakers, sun making its way to her face despite the waxen hair falling in her face.  Historia had shoes that must've been bought yesterday.  Hair that shone with salon brand products and mascara, something expensive and high quality, streaking her face.  

Admittedly, Ymir wishes she'd been there when Historia left the school.  When she ran all the way over here.  When she was young and selfish and smiling and screaming.  

Historia was really a shell of a girl.  The tears reminded Ymir of overflowing, dams breaking in her crystalline gaze.  Somewhere there was something coiled, hungry, selfish, suffocated by Historia's supposed personality.  

She sighs and continues to swing, watching the speckled ground beneath her shift.  There's an old piece of gum, blackened, right where Ymir's foot hits the ground.  She closes her eyes, feels the smothering heat and humidity hit her freckled cheeks.  She pretends she's flying.  

 

 

Historia doesn't go home after that.  The walk back to school is slow, like melting, like seeping through the cracks in the cement.  The anxiety is still coiled tight in her stomach, pressing against her chest.   Ymir's eyes, hooded and some color she can't describe, something brown and caramel and animal.  

She was right about her legs.  They're freckled.  She wants to trace the skin between each dot and make her own constellations.  A body is like a religion, like a biblical tome of something that can only be written in the curve of the eyelash and the bend of a carefully placed finger.

Ymir was wearing nail polish, chipped, the color of Historia's hair.  It looked messily applied, as if done by the hand of a nine year old.  It looked like Ymir.  

Historia wants to talk to Mikasa and Sasha and forget about Ymir.  

The sun is too bright in the sky for Historia to feel this cold.  

 

 

Annie is in all of her classes.  She's suspended in a perpetual state of boredom.  Her blue eyes are in danger of rolling right out of her head the next time she rolls them.  

Snap, Historia thinks, as she clicks her pen idly.  Her leg is shaking and her thumb won't stop compressing, decompressing, compressing, decompressing, to the rapidly increasing cadence of her heart.  Snap, she thinks again, of the nerve endings and blood veins popping, in the light and air of the world for their first time.  Even if that were to happen, Annie would probably still face her sightless towards the window.  In all her gory, red and blue and yellow glory.  Her eyes would bleed ice blue pigment at the same rate as her snapped capillaries.

Historia looks at her own hand, clicking the cheap blue pen.  Disgusting.  How awful she is.  Annie looks at her, head lolling slightly, eyes half hooded.  Her lashes are a black curtain, all spidery mascara.  She's wearing impeccably applied eyeliner. She looks great.  The deep, dark, points are as sharp as the woman herself.  

Historia looks down, stills her hand, settles with looking down at the task before her.  She would rather collapse on the spot than do another math problem.  The clock on the wall is sleek, black, stylish, and it says only fifteen minutes have passed.  

Historia smiles to herself.  Maybe there'll be a freak accident and the ceiling will cave in.  Maybe she'll be shot through the head for her stepfather's dumb opinions.  Maybe she'll be painted all over the wall.  A self portrait, of intestines and blood and pearly white teeth, of a perfect girl.  She'll be forgotten, but not quickly or quietly, she'll leave a void in lives, the love others will feel for her will outweigh her own self hatred and she'll die like she lived.  Like a star.  

Annie stares out the window, and Historia stares at her.  All sharp lines and pretty curves.  Short, compact, nothing but angles and cool colors.  

She wants, so badly, to love other people as much as she hates herself.  

She's not a star.  She's a black hole and she's collapsing in on herself.  

 

 

Her bed receives her tired body like a catchers mitt, soft and accepting.  Somewhere in the house, Anne is warming a blanket in the dryer and preparing a cup of hot tea.  The dry thump of the washing machine fills Historia's head like water poured from a pitcher.  

"Historia, dear," Anne whispers, peeking through the cracked door.  

"Hm?" The hum rumbles against her sore throat.  

"How are you feeling now?"  Historia wants to pour the hot tea all over her pretty maid face, scalding, steaming, shrieking like the whistle of a kettle.   

"Gross." She scrunches her nose at the rasp in her voice.  Saliva and bile mix in her mouth and she wants to spit it up.

"Oh dear," Anne coos, "I'll close your curtains."  She shuffles away, and Historia buries her face in her comforter.  Suddenly, everything is blissfully dark.  She can feel Anne's eyes on her.   Hears the pregnant, purposeful pause.  

The door shuts and Historia lets out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.  Downstairs, Anne opens and closes the dryer but doesn't come up the stairs.  She leaves Historia to herself.  Historia thanks her and curses her for that.  

The curtains are closed but there's a thin beam of light arcing against the wall, glaring, pulling her gaze towards it and irritating her tired eyes.  It's 1:36.  It's too early, too late, too much of everything and she's sick of it.  Of herself.  She's sick of falling apart and putting herself back together.

She can’t sleep.  All she can do is let her mind shuffle through sounds, songs, words, the feeling of water on her skin and fleshy hands holding hers.  Words just barely on lines, colors just barely in order, hands, noises, screams, chaos.  Brown eyes.  Blue eyes.  Butter and sugar on toast in the mornings.  Freckles, just barely there.  Black hair, black nail polish, black heart.

She scratches her knuckles, peels skin off, leaving her all raw and dirty.  The gravel under her nails are embedded in her skin now, like words, like needles.  Her throat aches like she swallowed keys and nails, nuts and bolts.  Her head is throbbing, throbbing, to the tune of her too fast heartbeat.  Historia, the sweet, the martyr, the girl who hides everything inside her.

 

 

Goddamn, it's too hot to be winter.  Ymir's hands are all bruised and her hair is all ripped out, her ratty baseball cap hiding its absence.  She ties her hair up anyways, tosses her cap from hand to hand, bears her red skin like a medal.  Her clothes are her mother's and her father’s, her shoes are shoplifted from target and her eyes, her eyes, they're crying black and gold.  

She's twelve years old, all bones and taut thigh muscles.  A force of nature that's just begun to grow.  

She's a fighter, too, learned how to punch and kick and bite from her father and his brawls.  His skin is sticky, snow white, so bright that her mother can follow his veins like rivers.  When he bruises it's ugly, all red and mottled and blue.  His skin is white like bleach and her mother drinks it in.  

Ymir's hands ache, even more than they do when she steals from the gas station and some older kid smacks that expired gum out her hands, when it stings like hornets nests and sticky red sunburn and aloe on skinned knees.

She spits at the older kids and raises her red knuckled hands.  She jumps on the tallest girl, who has blue shadow smeared on her eyelids like it’ll hide her black eye bruise.  Too quickly, she’s ripped off the girl.  Her tiny wrists shield her while she kicks out, falls on her butt.  She runs away because she doesn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything or herself.  And because she stole the tall girl’s purse.  There’s blue eyeshadow on the tips of her fingers.  There’s a lipstick and a tampon and five bucks in the purse.  Ymir pockets it all as she runs, runs, drops the cheap black purse like it’ll cover her tracks.

In the park, she sits on the bench.  Her knees are against her chest and her arms are curled around them.  She rips her pockets inside out and she looks at the things in her hands like they’re rough diamond trash.  There’s a picture of her dad.  It’s gone through the wash and she can hardly make out his eyes and his braids and his toothy smile.  His front teeth are chipped, right in the middle, from a barfight.  Her mom says that when she met him, he was two weeks sober.  He drank shots off her mother’s sunny skin that night, in the backalleys and shady places under streetlamps.  She was twenty two and she was a waittress and a cashier and an alcoholic.  Her mom was this multi-faceted performer, she was resplendent in unwashed clothes and undercuts.  

They got married two years later in clothes from Target and Goodwill.

Her mother was more beautiful then, Ymir imagines, than she ever was.

They didn’t take any pictures.

Instead, they went home, made love in the same room as their baby girl because they couldn’t afford better.  They were a gasp and a moan and the smell, no matter how pungent and musky, couldn’t make any place a home.

 

 

“Ymir,”  He said to her.

“Where are you getting these names?”  She whispered back, eyes bleeding mascara and bruises.

“My ass,”  he laughs, putting his war torn, beaten hands over hers.  He hasn’t left the country but she swears he’s got sniper shells in his veins.

“Ymir.”  She sings to herself and he sings it back.

“You oughtta marry me, Indian boy,” she says.

“I promise,” he says.  “I promise on the alcohol in my veins and my braids and my,” he can’t speak.

“Your what,” she prompts.  Her voice is raspy linen on his ears.

“On my beautiful baby girl.”  

“Good,” she says.

“Ymir.”  Their voices are one.  

“Where’d you get that one?”  She’s smiling at him and his chipped-tooth smile.

“Somewhere,” he says.  “I got it out of my stories.”

“Tell me one,” she murmurs against his skin.  He smells like dirt and antiseptic.

“I’ve bled out all my stories,” he says.  He’s got that accent that only the kids from the reservation get, from pulled on tongues and old words like music on their skin.

“Sounds like a story to me,” she says.  He’s got star-dusted skin, freckles, and he’s got braids down to the small of his back that he twists into a bun and hides under his baseball cap.

She’s all starry-eyed, all pretty, all ready to run away to wherever he wants to lead her and he’s ready to piggyback her all the way to whatever home he’s got up his sleeve.

 

 

“Three years,” he says.  “Three years we've been married and I fall further in love everyday.”

“Bullshit,” she says, baby on her hip.  “Your only love is whiskey.  Your only wife is vodka.”

“It’s in my blood, sugar, it runs through my veins like somethin’ the police gonna lock me up for.  I’ve been hangin’ like this for thirty days and fourty nights and I got no bail on my ass.  I’m Indian boy extraordinaire, I’ve got an ass like firecrackers, I’ve got nothing to lose and I’m in love.”

“You know those don’t mean nothin’ but pretty words.  You don’t tell stories like you used to.”  Her brows are creased like the stretchmarks on her tummy and the scrunch of her skin when he grabs her, molds her softness in his broad hands.  

“I told you.”  His eyes are shining, his breath is whiskey and vodka and bile.  “I bled those out a long time ago.”

“Get a goddamn transplant.”

“Nobody got blood like me.”

 

 

His car swerved.  He couldn’t tell if the rabbit’s eyes reflected his headlights or if his headlights reflected the rabbit’s eyes.  A goddamn beacon, he cried, a celestial being and it’s come for me and my skin.  Ain’t no leather jacket like an Indian skin one.  

 

  

The police said he was driving drunk, but when she leaned down to kiss his lips before the Indian Services men took him away, all she could taste was regret.  

 

 

Ymir's feet hurt from running.  Her cheap shoes barely have a sole, and she can feel the heat of the pavement on her skin.  No matter how blistered and tough her skin is, she can always feel the warmth like a sticky tongue fever.  

She stands up, hands in pockets.  The walk home is longer than usual, quiet.  She buys a box of Fruit Roll Ups, the brand-name ones that you can use to give your tongue little tattoos.  She works the box open and unfurls one, feels that leathery sweetness on her tongue.  

 

 

"Ymir?" The counselor asks.

Ymir looks away, pretends she didn't hear anything.  

"Ymir.  You have a call in the office."

"Okay."  Ymir's hair is all oily and shaggy around her pointed face.  She thinks she might cut it, cut it really short, once she gets into middle school.  Her mom still won't let her use the good scissors, even though she's already eight years old and the safety scissors feel like playthings in her long fingers.  Her music teacher says she has the fingers of a pianist.  Ymir says that she has the fingers of a pickpocket and that's how she wants to keep it.  Her music teacher also says that Ymir should learn to shut up and that she should stay in the principals office instead of mouth off to her.  

Ymir walks from the classroom.  It's silent reading time and when the counselor called for her everyone looked up at her and the counselor with round owl eyes.  She hates the feel of their sticky glares.  

The counselor walks Ymir into her office, sits down and beckons Ymir to do so as well.  Ymir sits, legs spread and arms crossed like she doesn't want to be there.  Because she doesn't.   

"Here you go, Ymir," the counselor says.  She's a tall white lady with a small, pointy nose and wispy blonde hair in a ponytail.  Her vest reaches way too low on her bony chest and Ymir makes a face.  

"Ymir?" The voice on the phone asks.

"Yeah, mom?"  Her mom's voice is wobbly, the way that it gets when she's been arguing at her father or when she looks at the electricity bill.  

"Dad....." Her mom pauses, and Ymir sighs.  He's done something dumb again, for sure, like drive 200 miles away and her mom had to get him and Ymir would need to make dinner.  Or he went to his mom's because she fell down or he started smoking again.

"What did he do this time?"  Ymir asks.  The counselor looks at her in worry.

"He died."

Ymir looks at her counselor with a wide-eyed gaze, and she knows the counselor already knew, and she knows the counselor wants to comfort her, and she wants to punch the counselor right in the lips, right on her red-painted lips.  Fuck, she wants to break her ribcage and break her heart just like hers was broken.  

"Okay."  Ymir cant think of anything to say.  She can't come up with the words to describe how she feels, just that it's some mixture of angry and sad and empty.  

"Ymir.... Are you okay?" Her mom asks worriedly.  Ymir looks at the phone in her hands.  What an alien object it is, she realizes.  How strangely is fits in her hand, how funny it is that it's shaking, shaking, shaking, it's about to fall out of her pickpocket hands.  

"Yeah," she whispers, and then she hangs up the phone.  

"Ymir...." The counselor begins, but it's too late.  Ymir is running, running, running, and she can't be stopped.  The counselor can't keep up in those heels, and nobody can catch up with Ymir either.  As she runs back home, Ymir swears she passes by speeding cars.  Her thrift store shoes feel like wings.  

The winding back alleys and streets are familiar enough for her feet to tread over paths, a shining path in front of her, leading back home.  

She runs and runs and runs, feet sore, legs burning.  Her breath in her lungs is a long forgotten echo, she's just choking on the too warm air now.  Her sweat trails down her cheeks the way her tears should.  

When she gets home, she collapses on the cement sidewalk.  Ymir's bony ass hurts, against the hardness of the cement.  She stretches out her legs, arches her back, brings her head to the pavement.  She stays like that for a while, breathing heavily, eyes closed.  

"Ymir?" Her mom's voice awakes her.  

"Ymir?"  Her mom is panicking.  Ymir can hear the soft rustle of her clothes as she rushed forward to check in Ymir.

Ymir opens a single eye to see her mother.  She looks like a mess.  Her cheeks are streaked with red and white.  Her eyes are red.  Her face is twisted in concern and horror and sadness.  

"I'm home, mama," Ymir says in a drawl.  Her mom comes to sit next to her on the sidewalk and takes her tired head into her lap.  

"How do you feel?"  Her mom asks.  Ymir realizes the emptiness in her chest isn't just from running until her heart bursts.  God, it's already been torn to little pieces.

"I want to go to sleep."  The tears are overflowing, all over her mother's soft thighs.  

"Okay."  Her mom tugs her up by the hand and guides her to her room.  Ymir's breath catches in the dark room, and, for once, she's alone.  Her mom isn't in here with Luis.  He's a noisy baby.  Luis must be with abuela.  Her mom gets really bad when she's sad, and either she pours the contents of the liquor cabinet down the sink and shivers, dehydrated and miserable in her bed, or she pours it down her throat instead.  

Ymir is tired of responsibility, of knowing her mother the way she does.  But God, she can't detach herself from it, from her mother and her father and his old smile.  His dead smile.  

When she dreams, she dreams that her father rises from his grave and drives her away from school.  His braids tangle in the wheels and his ratty baseball cap is left in Ymir's lap.  Her mother is in the backseat and she's screaming in Ymir's ear.  She wakes up to tears on her cheeks and a cold, cold, bed.  

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the short chapter. I've been writing up a lot of character sketches and stuff. I really want them to develop on their own rather than entering into a codependent relationship. Please leave any comments at all, constructive criticism and compliments are always welcome!


	6. Off-Brand Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mothers and homes are never the same. Ana remains in Historia's memory like a stain and she can not be rubbed away.

Ana’s fingers wrapped around hers are warm.  She speaks in low, reverent tones.  It makes Historia feel like she is a deity, an otherworldly figure to be worshipped.  As Ana’s skillful fingers make their way up and down and across her hands, she names the spots that her index finger moves across.

“That one is the proximal bone,” Ana says in her soft voice.  When Historia listens to her words, it feels like the has plunged her hands into fresh, moist dirt.  She grasps handfuls of it, and it is warm, it is clean, it is grounding.  Ana moves further up Historia’s fingers.

“This one is the middle, and then this is the distal.”  Ana softly prods the fleshy end of Historia’s finger before taking Historia’s other hand.  “The carpal bones are harder for me to name.  They aren’t so segmented or prominent.  But luckily for me, you have thin skin and little wrists.”  Ana grips Historia’s wrist.  “Very little wrists.”

Historia watches the soft ohs and ahs that Ana’s lips form.  Her lips are not thin like her mother’s and they close around each syllable with a gentleness.  As though Ana is afraid of biting her careful words in half with each press of her teeth against tongue and lips.

Ana rolls her thumb over Historia’s lower palm, searching for the telltale ridges of her carpal bones.

“Here is the scaphoid,” she says.  Her fingers hesitate as they come down on Historia’s hands.  “This is where the trapezium should be.  And here’s the trapezoid.  Probably.”  She laughs and releases her grip on Historia’s hand.

“Geez.  I can never keep track of these things, huh, Historia?”  Her fond smile bleeds away as it reaches her eyes.  Around the corners of her eyes, her skin sags and wrinkles.

Historia smiles and her upturned lips light up her cornflower blue eyes.  She leans forward and grasps Ana around her middle.  

“Yeah,” she says.  Ana’s hands fall into place around Historia’s head.  She cups her soft cheeks and traces the shell of her ear.

“Yeah.”

 

“Historia, please sit still for the nice lady.  All she wants are your measurements for your new uniform,” her mother says in that reedy voice.  This is the voice she uses when she is on the verge of yelling but knows they are in polite company.  Gazing down, Historia tries to put the alien hands on her back and neck out of her mind.  Strangely enough, the tailor’s hands placed carefully against her touch her reverently.  It is almost like the mousy brown-haired woman with measuring tape in hand and square-rimmed glasses perched on her round nose is scared of hurting Historia.  Almost as though to this thin lady with knobby hands, Historia is consequential.  Placed upon a pedestal reserved only for customers and the higher up.  Historia feels the pressure of nausea on her thin neck at the idea of the image this woman has of her.  The pressure wraps her thin body, creates fissure in each of her skinny bones.  Her fingers tingle slightly with imagined force and Historia pretends that they are each breaking, one by one by one.  The proximal, the middle the distal.  Her carpal bones rupture from within and she can not name them any longer because they have long since shattered.  The woman's hands clutch at the measuring tape as if it is a biblical tome.  Historia clenches her fists and clenches and clenches and mends her bones with the sheer force of her fingers, pressed hard against skin.  

 

Ymir walks home.  The swingset groans when it is relieved of her weight.  She chuckles.  It’s not like her bony ass weighs much anyways.

It feels like a heavy mass has buried itself in her gut.  She feels like doing something dumb, as if it will relieve the dryness in her throat.  Her legs are long, so she goes too fast for her thoughts to catch up with her.  Her head is blissfully blank as she makes her way up to the apartment, as she twists her wrist and shuts the door behind her.  

It is very quiet in the empty apartment.  On the TV, there is a clock.  Surrounding the clock face are painted-pink angels and clouds.  It’s only 9:12.  She should feel bad for skipping school, but it doesn’t really matter to her.  Her home is comfortably cooler than it is outside, and comfortably less crowded than school is.  So she stays.

At first she tries to sleep.  But her eyelids flutter softly even when she tries to drift away.

Laying in her bed lets her stew in her thoughts.  She doesn’t think she feels bad for Historia.  She has brought this upon herself.  She’s really very dumb, trying to pretend that she’s a saint.  

Impulsively, she swings her legs out of bed.  Ymir hates to be like this, to be static.  She massages that grainy feeling from her numb legs and sets to work, letting her body move as an automaton and her feet guide her where her mind won't.  

  


Historia's father, Rod, is away from home today, just as he said he would be.  Her mother and their maids are the ones who surround Historia now.  It makes her feel less and less like getting out of bed.  

"Historia," Anne says, calling in that soft and sweet voice.  "We've made you and your mother dinner.  If you'd like, you can come and eat."

She doesn't want to.  The great wide dining table is far too cold, with icy wooden seats and frozen porcelain platters.  Worst of all is her mother's hostile gaze.  And even worse than that is when she looks at Historia like she is just another wilted bouquet of flowers from her husband, that Anne will throw away.  

God, does she not want to go downstairs.  She shivers at the thought of even having to swing her foot off of her bed and onto the cold wooden floor of her bedroom.  

"Historia?" Anne calls again from the hallway.  "Your food is getting cold."

Grimacing and scrunching her face, Historia stands.  She feels like puking again from the sheer force of her anxiety.  Which isn't uncommon.  

"I'll be coming in just one second," she answers softly, popping her head out to see Anne.  Her maid's face is very close so hers, so close Historia can see her spidery mascara and shiny gray eyes.  She's pretty in that dusty old-town manner.  Swiftly, Anne steps back, eyes shifting to look anywhere but Historia’s pale moon face.  She smiles a little uncomfortably and Historia can not bring herself to care.  

"Thank you Historia," Anne says.  

Nodding, Historia slips back into her room to examine herself in her mirror.  Her mother hates when she's disheveled, or when she greets her in pajamas.  Today Historia does not think she can handle the full force of her mother's irritation, not after the events of this afternoon.  

She starts by combing her stringy hair, first with her fingers then with a comb.  Her school clothes, messily strewn across her bedroom floor are also soon donned until she thinks she has achieved some semblance of put-togetherness.  

Her actions try to put that girl out of her mind.  

Like this morning, the hardwood stairs are cold to the touch.  They almost sting her feet as she descends.  But what stings her most are her mother's eyes.  

Historia can not decide what is worse about her mother, her terrible personality or the fact that she is so unnervingly similar to herself.  Her eyes are the same brand of blue, her hair a shade lighter than her own.  Her incredible selfishness too eerily like Historia's.  Her worst fear is probably becoming her mother.  

Her face strains to make a pleasant expression, though she knows it does not extend to her eyes.  

"Good evening, mother," she speaks, beaming.  "I apologize for making you wait for me."

Her mother regards her, stares her up and down and through and through as though she does not believe that it is her own daughter that stands before her.  

"Oh," her mother chimes in with a voice devoid of charm, "I wasn't waiting for you."

Historia's heart plummets like the mercury in a thermometer, her hands clammy.  No matter how much she hates her mother, she is always yearning to impress her.  Somehow.

"That's good to hear," Historia answers cheerfully, still hyper aware of Anne observing their stiff interaction.  

Her mother's gaze pierces her, one eyebrow raised, her thin lips pursed.  Historia knows what she is thinking, knows because she is so terrifyingly similar to the woman staring at her.  

Don't put up that pathetic act, her mother says in her mind.  Don't pretend, don't smile, don't put up that disgusting front.  You aren't nice just to be nice.  All you want is for others to like you.  You want them to pity you.  You want them to worship you.  You want to suck up all of their love and give nothing in return.  You goddamn atrocity, parasite girl, big-eyed beetle, dewy-skinned incubus.  

Historia tells herself to stop putting thoughts in others heads.  She tells herself that she will not be loved if she assumes like this.  And she says to herself, too, that it doesn't matter.  Her mother will never love her anyways.  

"What are you waiting for?  Sit down," her mother says in that biting tone.  Her upturned nose and eyes are too much like Historia's own.

Blanching, Historia does as she is told, almost forgetting her facade.  

"Well, today we have grilled chicken and seasoned brown rice, along with a salad and homemade vinaigrette," Anne says to Historia.  Her mother is already eating.  

"Thank you," she says, trying to sound cheery.  "Sounds delicious, as always."

"Anne," her mother says.  "On second thought, I think I'll eat in my room.  Come for my dishes when I'm finished."

Historia watches as her mother ascends the stairs, wine and chicken and rice in hand.  She watches as her mother's hips away back and forth and realizes that this is not her first, nor her last time eating alone.  

Casting her eyes up at Anne, she attempts a cheery grin.

"Could I have a glass of milk with that, please?"

  


Dinner is eaten fast, and eleven o'clock comes faster.  Ymir's siblings have long ago fallen asleep.  In the living room, she reclines with her back against the couch and a bowl of cereal in her lap.  The television buzzes softly, the laugh tracks and the harsh artificial glow of the late night talk show casting Ymir's angled face in dark shadows.  Her backpack is left at the foot of the couch, unopened.  

Outside, she hears the jangling of keys pressed into a lock.  Her mother is home, only here for a couple of moments before she leaves again at twelve o'clock for a convenience store night shift.  Lazily, Ymir turns her head to watch her mother enter.  

Casting a bleary-eyed glance at Ymir, her mother drags herself past.  Her hair has tumbled from her once severe bun, and now lies on her shoulders like a great mane.

Her mother cut her hair just barely past shoulder several years ago.  Right after they left Soledad's father.  She said it was a new start for her, a new beginning.  

Now, her hair almost reaches its same length from years ago.  Perhaps it means something.  

Or perhaps what matters most are the gray streaks in her hair, or the dark circles under her eyes that she hides with makeup.  But Ymir is a master of pretending that she does not notice.

"Get to bed," is all her mother can say to her before she ambles to her room and shuts the door.  It squeaks on unoiled hinges, the screech ripping through the lull of silence in the apartment.

Ymir shrugs and continues munching on her offbrand cereal.  It's overly sweet and the food dyes cast the milk an unnatural brown color.  Reaching for the remote, she hits the off button.  The television turns off, winking before Ymir is cast in darkness.  She thinks that it suits her better, this solitude and absence of sound and color.  

Now, the only sounds in her ears are her own molars grinding together.  Now she is filled with sugary sweet cereal and memories of the day before and she realizes, finally, just how tired she is.

 

 

Historia’s new uniform fits her too well.  The linen fabric and wool jacket sit on her skin just right enough that it irritates her skin.  It moves over her skinny hips when she stands, when she walks, when she breaths.  It buzzes against her like some sort of insect.  

The skirt falls just above her knees.  It’s the same deep blue as her cardigan, which wraps snugly around her shoulders and thin arms.  She tucks the loose linen shirt into her skirt and smooths it out.  She does not like it.  While she is alone in her room trying on this uniform, she thinks about ripping it apart.  The tightly sewn seams might give her trouble, she thinks, tugging her skirt.  

“Historia?” her mother sings, her voice piercing Historia’s thoughts.  “Are you finished?  We want to see how you look.”  The voice is subtly irritated and the lilt in her mother’s voice grates her ears.  Turning away from the mirror, Historia heads for her door.  Her tiny fist wraps around the doorknob and turns it.

She sticks her head out first.  Her curtain of blonde hair falls from her shoulders and hangs from her head.  The nervous expression on her face is carefully formed.  After a moment, she steps out from behind the door, standing before her parents, looking anywhere but at her mother.  

“You look so professional!”  Rod huffs loudly at his daughter, grinning big and excited.  He reaches out for her mother’s hand and clasps it, smiling at his wife.  She returns it and that soft gaze is back.  Historia longs for it and she frowns.

“Mom, what do you think?”  she asks, voice incredibly hopeful despite her best efforts.

"You look nice, Historia" her mother answers, pulling her gaze away from Rod.  Her eyes act as a reflection of Historia's, except when Historia looks into her mother's eyes, she feels like shattering.

"Thank you," Historia says, looking to the side.  "I think I'll change back into my normal clothing now.  Thank you, Ro-" her tongue freezes on the syllable.  "Thank you, Father."  

Her eyes wide, hands shaky, Historia flees to her bedroom and tugs her clothing off.  Standing there in her room, ceiling light casting warm yellow light against the walls and her porcelain cheeks, Historia realizes again that she will never have a place in her mother's heart.  That she will always be fighting for an acknowledgement and she will never get it.  When Rod came, when he became her father, her mother's husband, she was beat out once again.  Once again she was nothing more than an insect, a hindrance, a piece of gum in the road that has been run over again and again.

And now she stands here in her room, skin bare and clenched fists and she wishes she did not feel.  That she did not tug at her mother's sleeve.  In her out there is a hole, a hole named Mother, a hole named Rosa, a hole that will never be filled.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is probably the shortest chapter I've posted yet!! sorry!! I know I haven't posted in forever, but I figured I should post this. I'm planning to get through a few chapters this moth, tho, in celebration of NaNoWriMo !! So, look forward to that !!


	7. Clean Slate, Dirty Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New schools sure are hard to deal with.

_**7.** _

**Clean Slate, Dirty Face**

 

 

Ymir’s new school does not welcome her, so she does not try to make it.  She does not speak, except to be rough.  She is thirteen, and angry, and hurt, and has a dumb haircut.  Of course they don’t like her.

“Ymir,” her teacher says.  “You haven’t turned a single complete assignment in.”  

“Yeah,” Ymir replies, looking away.  

“Look at me,” her teacher says.  

“Okay,” Ymir answers, rolling her head and eyes before meeting her teacher’s gaze.  She is pretty, with dark brown skin and eyes that are almost black.  Her hair falls in thick curls just above her shoulders.  Her pale blue blouse is perfectly ironed.  She does not look happy and Ymir knows it is her fault.  Ymir feels kind of bad, but not really.  It pisses her off.  Her teacher is not talking to her because she cares about her grades or her education.  Ymir is here because her straight Ds reflect her teachers and school badly.

“You have to take this seriously if you don’t want to end up a dropout, Ymir.”  Her teacher sighs.  “I know your home life isn’t good, but-”

“What do you know about my family?” Ymir asks, keeping the same bored expression while her voice rises. “I mean, you don’t know me, so why do you care? I’m probably just another dumb kid who doesn’t care about school to you.”  She shrugs nonchalantly.  “Like, there's nothing you can do about that.” Ymir keeps looking at her teacher and she does not look away.  

“Ymir,” she begins, clearly surprised.  Ymir doesn’t speak much.

“If I do my work, will you stop talking to me?”  Ymir asks.

“I… I guess,” her teacher answers and Ymir looks away.

“Okay,” Ymir says.  “Now can I leave?”  

“No, Ymir, please-”

“May I leave?” Ymir asks, voice is dripping with contempt.

"Ymir, please," the teacher says, obviously irritated.

"Thank you, Ma'am," Ymir says, cutting her off and leaving the office.  

She heads down the hallway, mindful of the fluorescent lights hanging from the low slung ceilings like overripe fruit.  Their buzz echoes in her head, replacing the usual noise.

The walk home is long.  She told her teacher that she had a ride back home, that it wouldn't matter if she missed the bus. That was probably dumb to say.

Her sneakers scuff the pavement as she kicks a rock.  It rolls of the sidewalk and into the road.  Emotionlessly, Ymir considers it, sharp edged and lonely on the asphalt.  The sidewalk sparkles like plastic rhinestones and newly opened wounds.  

She continues. She walks ahead. She wishes she hadn't lied to her teacher like that and that she was not rude.  Her teacher probably hates her.  Which is okay probably.

A car pulls up next to Ymir, silvery-hued hood catching the sunlight.  It might even be pretty if there wasn't a fist-sized indent pressed into the hood.  Ymir thinks of her own skinny arm and fist and fingers and wonders if someone could punch a cavern into a car.  Probably not.

She looks spitefully at the car, raking the raggedy tires and opened window with her eyes.  Then she meets the eyes of the driver.

The driver has pretty doe-eyes, sharp and softly curved around the iris.  They inspect Ymir and her stride and her angry eyes from behind rectangular spectacles, hanging crooked from a hooked nose.  The driver’s hair is wild and thick, tamed by only a hairband that binds it at the base of their neck.  They smile and it is an unsettling smile, a shivers-down-your-spine sort of smile.  

Ymir should know that this person staring her down is not someone who she should provoke.  She knows it, somewhere. But she remains sharp-eyed and reproachful.

“Hey kid!” The driver says.  Their voice is shrieky, sweet, grating on Ymir’s eyes like sugar.  “No need to look at me like that.  I'm a teacher, not a criminal!” They laugh. “Well, mostly.”

“That's why your car is so shitty, huh?”  Ymir says, pointing at the dent.  She understands that this will piss most people off.  She also does not care.

“You're a funny one,” the car’s driver says. “You know, kids these days just aren't honest enough.  I'm Hange, your local neighborhood art teacher and non-gendered being.”

Ymir side-eyes Hange.  They have stopped their car completely and now idle beside Ymir.

”It’s really late, you know,” Hange says.  Ymir realizes that it really has gotten near twilight during her walk home.  She also realizes she isn’t really that close to her house by now.  “Can I drive you home?”  Hange continues. 

Ymir is wary. 

“You don't know where I live. I thought teachers were supposed to be smart.” Ymir considers starting a fight. Her mother won't be home soon anyways.

“That'd be a perfect world, huh?” They say.  “Smart teachers and kind parents and fair policemen.”  Laughing, they extend a hand.  “You want a ride, kid?”

“No,” Ymir answers, and walks ahead.  And then she remembers how many blocks remain until she reaches her home and how badly her feet hurt.

“Maybe,” she decides.  She looks at Hange, and they smile big and wolfish.

“Then get in.”  They observe Ymir and her long skinny legs and ratty backpack as she folds herself into the car. Even though she is only thirteen, she's nearly 5’8”.  Her mother says she'll keep growing.  

“I'm an art teacher at the high school,” Hange begins. Ymir tunes her out, not caring.  She's not very smart, accepting a ride from a stranger. Maybe she wants to get hurt. Do something dumb that will let her stop being.  

“Anyways, today I was hanging out at the middle school with their art teacher.  She's real nice you know, but that teacher sort of nice that makes you think she'll bake you a casserole or something.  Anyways, turns out she has a son who I teach! Strange how the world works, huh kid?”  Hange pauses at a stop sign and looks at Ymir for some sort of sign that she is listening.  Ymir is not, so she stares out the window and avoids eye contact.

“You know,” Hange says, “a smart girl wouldn't let a stranger drive her home.” Ymir looks up, glancing at Hange and their sharp profile and sharply curved nose.  Their smile is strange, as though they are examining something new and strange and exciting.  Ymir almost shivers.

“I guess I'm not a smart girl.  But I already knew that,” Ymir says.  She does not know why she is like this, sometimes, doing things without remembering the consequences.  

“Hey kid, book smart isn't the only sort of smart there is.”  Hange takes a hand from the wheel, gesturing at Ymir. “You seem, like, street smart or art smart or family smart, you know?” Ymir looks at Hange, irritated.

“Whatever you say, Hange.” Ymir says it in a drawl, clearly sarcastic and disrespectful.

“Whew,” Hange exhales loudly. “Definitely not people smart!” They grin, big and wild and smug.  Ymir has never seen someone with so many smiles plastered on their face at all times.

“Okay. Thanks,” Ymir answers, before looking up to see her street.  “Drop me off here.”  She isn't sure she wants this Hange person knowing where she lives.  She's had enough teachers for today.

“Sure!” Hange remarks, smoothly pulling over, but far faster than is probably legal.  They did things like this, very articulately and concisely, but with an underlying tone of franticness and speed.  

“Don't want me to know where you live?” Hange asks as Ymir pulls herself from the car and extracts her legs.  They unfold like a crushed note on a piece of ripped out notebook paper.

“Not particularly,” Ymir answers.  “Don't really want you to know anything about me.” She is slightly disappointed that nothing happened and kicks herself in her mind. She is dumb like this all the time.

“You're a rude kid,” Hange decides, closing their door and beginning to move slowly.  “Try not to accept any more rides from strangers.  Not all weirdoes with old cars are as nice as me.”  They roll up their window and drive off.  Ymir watches them, in their dented silver car, and she shakes her head.  

She had better not get this teacher during high school.

 ***

Her mother drives her to school.  The silence is suffocating, like hands pressed around her neck and fingers forced down her throat.  She does not even try to feign any semblance of kindness.  When Historia clambers in, she hurries her.  Her mother’s eyes are sharper than any scolding words.  

As they near the school, Historia tugs at the hems of her sleeves and the pulled in corners of her uniform skirt.  She shifts slightly, pulling her hands in to her lap and looking down at them.  She clenches and unclenches them, feeling them move.  Skin against skin, tangible and tactile.  It keeps her in the moment.  It makes her feel real.

The new school does not fit Historia as well as her new clothes.  It's not an incredibly big school, but it's old and impeccably tended.  The rose bushes’ thorns all seem to be clipped away, leaving them half naked and pitiful.  They are beautiful anyways.  Historia thinks for a moment, that she wishes she could be like those roses.  Tender and pretty and smooth, prickles torn away.  Instead her thorns have enveloped her, until girl and flower and thorn are indistinguishable.  Perhaps it is best, not to be vulnerable.  

It's not her first time seeing the school, but it's her first time seeing it and realizing that it is her school.  It’s so terribly familiar.  So terribly old and beautiful and unknown.  She is the control in a world full of variables and it is terrifying.

Her mother stops very slowly, coasting to an open parking spot.  The cars parked on either side of them seem very expensive.  Even Historia can tell, with her soft and inexperienced eyes.  

“That’s nice,” her mother mutters, glancing at the shiny white car next to them.  “I should get Rod to buy me something like that.”  Historia glances at her mother with something that isn’t distaste or surprise.  It is more of a resigned glance.  Her mother always did excel at envying the things of others.  For looking at something good and pure and seeing nothing but its pretty white facade.

“What are you looking at, Historia?” Her mother asks.  Historia swiftly turns away.  Her eyes are averted.  She doesn’t say anything back.  Her hands loosen their death grip on the hem of her skirt.  For some strange reason, she is comforted by these words from her mother.  Everything may seem to change but her mother really will always hate her.  

She realizes that this means that it was never their shitty house.  It was never their electricity bills or chronically falling apart car.  It was her.  It was her.  It was her who was always there and it was her who always ruined things.

At least when she was torn from the familiar she could be assured that she remained filthy.  

“Hurry up,” her mother snaps.  Historia looks up at her mother.  She is apathetic and cold around the eyes.  She shivers.

“Sorry,” Historia mutters.  Sorry, sorry, sorry, she repeats in her head as she stands and takes her place half a step behind her mother.  Sorry, for being an absolute roach.  An insect to be crushed underfoot.  Sorry for being around to fuck up everything.

Now she knows.  She knows.  She knows just how awful she is.  She knows why her hands shake and her laugh is fake and her eyes are stony.  She knows why she shatters so easily and why, no matter how hard she tries, she can not put the pieces together correctly.

***

Historia pretend she is asleep so that Anne will softly touch her back to wake her up.  She wants the human connection and the false reassurance that someone will not recoil in disgust when they feel her filthy heartbeat.  Even if that person is paid to care about her.  It just reinforces the fact that Historia knows, that she doesn’t matter if she does not give something to others.

“Historia, it’s time to wake up.”  Anne’s voice is soft and sweet.  

“Oh,” Historia mutters, pretending to be tired.  She has been awake for an hour but she spent it tracing the shadows on her walls.  “Thank you, Anne.  I’ll be down in a minute.”  She turns on her side to look at Anne.

Anne looks soft in the early morning sunlight.  Her cheeks are plump and her smile is little.  Genuine.  Maybe Historia should take notes.

“Okay, Historia,”  Anne tells her.  Her thin voice is heavy with care.  Historia relishes it.

Anne shuffles out of her room quickly and quietly.  Her quiet footsteps recede as she returns to the kitchen to prepare a meal.

Historia did not dream the night before.  She takes that as a good sign.  Perhaps her vomit, yellow and orange and pink and brown on the shimmering asphalt drained her.  Hopefully she has vomited her emotions away.

Anxiety hits her in the gut like a hammer even before she can fully stand.

Perhaps it will take much more bile to clear her conscience.

She thinks of that girl.  Her name is Ymir and she is sharp and she hurts to look at.  She is always inexplicably there and it pisses Historia off as much as it pleases her.

She thinks of her honey eyes and soft drawl.

She thinks of the incessant pounding of her head when they meet eyes.  

An ugly monster claws out a space in her head.

The girl in her art class hates her or loves her, or she would not look at Historia.  She has to give her something.  She has to be something.  She has to pitied to be anything and when that girl looks at her she can feel an emotion prickling against her skin that is wrong.  As wrong as Historia herself is.

This trip to the bathroom is short.  She has nothing to throw up but bile.  She spits into the toilet and gasps.  Her hurried breaths and heavy heartbeat mix in her head until they have become an angry symphony.

“Historia?” Anne asks.  Historia turns, wide-eyed.  The bathroom door is open and Anne looks at her with wide eyes.  The worry in them makes Historia sick to her stomach.

“Are you alright?” Anne says, speaking again.  It breaks the heavy hammering of her heart.

“Yeah.”  Historia mutters.  She wipes her mouth and her hand comes away sticky with spit and bile.  It almost makes her retch again.

“Yeah,” she repeats, more to herself than Anne.  

“If you’re sure,” Anne says.  Her words are hesitant but Historia stands.  She moves to flush the toilet.  She sweeps her thin hair behind her shoulder and looks up at Anne.  

“It was nothing.  Just a little nausea.  No big deal.”  Historia ducks past Anne.  She can not muster even a half smile.  “Don’t worry Anne, if there was anything really wrong I would tell you.”

Anne’s eyes soften at Historia’s words.  She nods and smiles.

“That’s good to hear,” she answers and her voice is sunshiney.  Sweet.  

Historia nods and moves down the hall, to her own room.  It’s clean and bright.  The curtains have been pulled away to reveal the sky.  The sun peeks up from over the tree in the front yard, allowing rays of light to spill over and fill Historia’s room.

Historia sheds her shorts and shirt methodically.  They are soon replaced by a soft pair of clothes that fall against her skin in soft folds.  Her white shirt rustles as she bends to pull her socks over her ankles.  They’re navy colored, highlighting her creamy skin.  Even in the soft yellow glow of the sun, her skin is pale pink.  Her veins appear like rivers beneath her skin.

Historia shoulders her backpack and grabs her shoes by their laces.  They hang, clenched by little hands as she pads softly out of her room.  She begins that trek from her room to the kitchen, stepping as softly as she can.  It’s not as though she’d wake anyone if she made a racket; her mother is likely in a wine-induced stupor.

Anne’s smiling face greets Historia.  Her mousy brown hair floats in a halo around her hair where it has come free from its bun.  She is holding a mug of herbal tea and a steaming bowl of oatmeal.  It’s too hot for tea and oatmeal; it actually always has been.   She accepts it anyways, letting the steam fog her senses and the mint of the tea dull her tongue.  She needs it, if she plans on confronting the day.

Now, she wishes she had abandoned that good girl facade so that she could get drunk or high or something and float through her day like a specter.  No such luck, though.  Instead, the oatmeal burns her tongue and she relishes the sensation.  

“Thank you, Anne,” she says, standing to hand her maid the bowl.

“It’s my pleasure, Historia.”  She immediately begins to rinse out the bowl and smiles, still speaking.  “It’s so nice of you to make your bed and give me your dishes, you know.  My mother says I should be grateful you’re such a nice girl.”

“It’s just because you’re such a nice maid, Anne.”  She enunciates her self deprecating words carefully, like a charm or a spell.  She wonders how rude she could be to Anne before she lashed out at her.  What words would make the other woman bite at Historia’s throat and grasp at her neck with those chubby fingers.  She grimaces at herself and sits again to lace her shoes.  Methodically, she draws each lace together and then apart.  The bow in her hand is stretched and pulled then falls limp against her foot.  She repeats the process.

A process.  That’s all it is, when she wakes up and eats her hot food and goes to school and does her work and goes to sleep.  She turns the gears of the whole machine.

She is not the machine.

Her heart that beats is not her own and its sickly sweet pace belongs to something else.

She is wrong because everyone else is wrong, but that’s okay.

Her shoes are now laced.

“I’m off to school now,” she says to Anne.  The girl raises a hand in goodbye and hums a soft affirmation.

She does not play any music in her car as she rides to school, just like that first day at that stupid private school.  They called it an academy and pictures of former chairmen and principals littered the wall.  They smiled their great gray smiles at Historia everyday when she walked down that one hall, the one with the great big windows on one side and pictures on the other.  It didn’t even have any classrooms either, just a big pitiful waste of space made to enshrine some old men.

The school was a boarding school too, for some students.  Annie and Reiner were some of them.  Bertholdt too, but he was admitted on a scholarship and he always studied, great big beads of sweat rolling down his nose as he bent over his papers.  

Historia went to the dormitories just twice in her time at the school. It loomed over the school and Historia shivered in its particularly deep shadow on some days.

But now it’s her own car and her own carely manufactured silence and the sunlight flooding in, caressing her face. At least this time, she is drained and alone on purpose.  

The traffic is sparse until she reaches the school, where cars shuffle along.  She focuses on her feet, looking up only when she needs to.  On all sides, she is trapped, like some sort of bug pinned on a piece of cardboard.  Would she be a moth or a cockroach?

She hears a knocking on her car window, and there she is, a wolfish smile on her face and eyes a little too yellow to be hazel.

“Hey doll,” she drawls.  Today the girl is wearing a white collared shirt, unbuttoned.  The way she’s leaning out of her car, her breasts and her collarbone bite at the space around them.  Historia sees that her chest is as full of freckles as her face and that her skin is riddled with light scars, bruises, and fine hairs.  She looks away and rolls down the window.  

“Yes?” she tries to say nonchalantly.  She wants to drive forward and be rude and leave the girl hanging there, but she doesn’t.  She looks at her with a smile purposefully uncomfortable.

“You okay?”  She asks, her smile getting tugged at the corners by invisible strings.  “Saw you puking the other day at the old playground.  You seemed pretty out of your element.”  She doesn’t sound genuinely concerned, or curious.  Her inflections make Historia feel like she’s being sized up or examined.

“Really?  I don’t remember that.”  Historia fakes a sorrowful voice.  “Must’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

“Hmm?”  Ymir hums, smiling like her questions haven’t quite been answered as she wanted.  “My mistake then, huh?”  She smirks.

The car behind them honks.  Ymir’s eyes dart over and she’s clearly pissed.

“Fuck you too, man!”  She retreats, feline-like, back into her truck.  Historia rolls up her own window, but not before hearing a faint goodbye.

“See you later,” Ymir says, and darts into the queue forming to get into the parking lot.

Historia watches her, confused, agitated, angry.  Maybe it was dumb to try to pretend she didn’t vomit at that stupid playground that she used to go to.  But when has Historia been good at making the right decision?

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for posting late!! I didn't really like some of what I had written so I went back and just rewrote it..... I wrote a lot last month but a lot of it needs to be edited and chunks need to be deleted.... thanks for bearing with me!!


	8. You Are Only Alone Because You Wished It So

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> lots of introspection, lots of trying to fill a hole in her heart with other people. it doesn't work; it never works.
> 
> ymir finds herself to be unreadable, almost as indecipherable as the girl named historia.

_**8.** _

 

**You Are Only Alone Because You Wished It So**

 

 

Historia meets one of the girls who lives in the dorms on her third day at school.

The girl she meets has thin blond hair, two shades lighter and greater deal more platinum than Historia’s.  Her eyebrows are hardly there on her oval face.  Her eyes are big and blue and dull, like they are shining from within but absorbing all that light once again. She is beautiful, with thin bony fingers and legs with fair hair that shines white with sunlight when she’s outside. 

“Why are you here so early?” Historia's asks, on a cloudy day.  Only she and the girl are in the classroom.

“Because I can be.” The girl answers.

“Is it boring?  We're both here a half hour before school starts.” Historia's maid dropped her off early today because she said she has a project to finish.  Really, she just wanted to leave the house before her mom woke up.  Last night she got mad at her again.

“I guess.  The dorms suck anyways so I don't care.” The girl looks away in disinterest.  Historia's realizes her questions are probably irritating but she doesn't really care very much about how the girl feels about it.

“You live in the dorms? Are they nice?” Historia's wishes, sometimes, that she could live in the dorms and not have to go back home everyday to the house that is too big for her.

“Why do you care so much?” The girl has finally decided that confronting Historia is worth it in comparison to a continuation of her questions.

“I just, you know,” Historia wonders about the answer herself.  “Want to make conversation with my classmate” she answers.  

“You're real weird,” the girl says in response. Her eyes are dull still, like unpolished sapphires.

“Okay.” Historia answers.

They don't talk again.  Historia comes to school early but the girl isn't in the classroom. The girl from the dorms. It's not a very big deal, actually, because she has lots of friends.  They braid eachothers hair and they hold hands and giggle.  They are all politician’s daughters and they gravitate towards Historia.  Historia feels like she is a shoddily constructed doll in the midst of porcelain ones.

She sees the girl one cold morning, sitting on a bench.  The sun has hardly risen, which is when Historia likes coming to school.  There is nobody there except teachers and everything is quiet.  She has decided that she hates her friends, who are loud and cling to each other too much.  She hates herself too, and her stepdad, and her teacher with her severe bun and pointy shoes.

Historia waves and sits next to her.  They don't speak and Historia wishes it was cold enough for her breath to mist.

“Why are you always here so early?” the girl finally asks.

“I like doing homework at school.” Historia answers.

“That's a lie,” the girl says. “I've never seen you doing any work.”

“A lie?” Historia asks. “Yeah, I guess so.”

They don't speak again and they look over the campus. It is dark on the half light of dawn.

“I'm Annie,” the girl says.

“I'm Historia,” Historia answers. They do not speak for a very long time, not until the sun rises completely and the campus is flooded with warm hands and people.

***

“You're such a fucking prude, Historia!” Her friend says.  She has the same green eyes and dimples from elementary school.  

“Okay,” answers Historia.  She doesn't like the taste of the alcohol on her tongue.  It reminds her of her mother.  She wonders if her mother got drunk like this after school, with boys and girls and a hot basement room.

There are mostly kids from the Catholic school at the party, which is where Historia comes from.  She has a big cardigan and leggings and a loose white t shirt on and her hair on a bun.  The other girls are smiling and drinking very freely, with white white teeth.  One of Historia’s friends is kissing a boy from another school.

Historia looks down at her phone to see n email notification.  She pretends it is a text.

“I have to leave guys, my mom wants me back home.” She stands and looks around.

One girl nods and waves.

“Have fun,” she calls out. She focuses on her drink and her other friend again.  Historia resents them a lot, but she can't blame them for not caring too much about her exit.  Maybe she should've been more extravagant about it.  

Historia doesn't have a ride home, so she walks.  The school is on the way back from her friend’s house, so she stops there.  It's not cold so she takes off her cardigan.  

She sits on a bench within school grounds.  She watches the clouds pass and she wishes she could move and dissolve and come together like that again, moving constantly and always needed.  Loved.

Annie is there, too.  She ambles to Historia and sits by her.

“You don't live here,” Annie says.  She has a tank top and gray sweatpants on.  Historia is now aware that she is probably drunk anyways, even though she didn't want to be.

“No,” Historia says. She feels very small next to Annie, who is small but still bigger than Historia.  Around her hips and thighs and arms is muscle.  

Historia decides to kiss Annie.  

Annie’s lips aren't very soft and her skin is a little dry and she jerks away in surprise.  

“Sorry,” Historia says.  “I just kind of wanted to try it.”

“Don't do that,” Annie says.  She sounds uncomfortable, like her voice is coming from a box.

“Yeah.” Historian pauses, feeling the full weight of how awful she is come to rest on her shoulders.  The drunkenness makes her feel simultaneously more like herself and farther away from her body than she’s ever been.  She realizes that this extra layer of self hatred doesn’t mean much.   

“Can you forgive me, Annie? I'm sorry.” Historia doesn't really feel anything, except for the awful feeling that her mother would have most likely done the same thing. Got drunk and kissed someone without asking first.  

“I have to go,” Annie answers.  Historia hears discomfort on Annie’s usually deadpan voice.

Historia nods and Annie walks away.

Historia decides to say hello to Reiner.  He lives in the dorms too.

“Are you drunk?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Historia says. “Sorry”

“It's no big deal.” He comes out of his room and they walk around the school campus.

“Would you kiss me?” Historia asks.

“Is that an offer?” Reiner asks, jokingly.

“No.” Historia answers.

“Maybe,” Reiner answers, scratching his head.

“Okay,” Historia answers. “Do it.”

“You're fucking drunk,” Reiner answers.  Historia does not like when he acts like a good person, because he probably is one and it makes her feel a little bad.

“Yeah,” she answers.  “Don't do it,” she says.  She does not feel so drunk and she wants to go home, but not to her stepdad’s house.  She thinks of a boxy apartment and a warm hand and she thinks of a small shoebox and she thinks about dying.  She thinks about running away to that apartment, and then she tells herself that would be selfish and nobody would care.  

“I'm leaving,” Historia says.  She veers away and takes short strides away from Reiner.

“You're drunk,” he says. No fucking shit, she thinks.  

“Sorry.” Historia doesn't know what to say other than that.

“Will you be alright?” He asks.

“I'll be okay.  Go to sleep,” Historia answers.  If she was run over by a car, or stabbed as she walked home, would he care?  Would Annie feel bad?  She hoped her mom wouldn't find out she had been drinking.  

Historia can imagine the words at her own funeral.

“She was a beautiful girl, just like me,” her mother says to a teary crowd.

Just like her! Like her! Like her!

Historia doesn't feel herself walking home, but she feels it when she turns on the shower and it's too hot and her skin is red for hours afterwards from the scalding water.

 

Ymir doesn't like to speak to people very much.

In middle school, her teachers seem to think of her as the kid who goes out at night and parties and gets drunk and goes skateboarding in the dark nights.  Honestly, sometimes she wishes they were right and that she was not always so lonely.  

In reality, she is very lonely.  She thinks maybe it's just genetic.  Sometimes, when her mom is drunk, she tells beautiful stories and in it her father has lonely eyes and the corners of his lips are always turned upwards.  Skywards.  Like he is being pulled elsewhere.  Her mother doesn't cry then, but her eyes looks so lonely and the thought weighs heavy in the room: he was always meant to die.  They all are, but her father in particular.  His limbs were pulled like those of a puppet, up and down and all about until his limbs became tangled in the strings and he was yanked away.

Ymir studies her fingers and wonders if the ridges on her fingers are not tendons nor ligaments nor veins, but rather the string that will pull her up and away from where she is.  

It has not been long since she moved to this new school.  The year will be over in just a month and a half anyways, and after that she’ll move onto ninth grade anyways.  The high school is far away from the middle school and she wonders if the strings running through her will pull her there as well.  

Or if they will be cut, and oh God, her father will have finally left her to fall, limp-limbed, into hell.

 

Annie doesn't talk to her, though it seems she wants to.  Historia wants to pretend that she was never drunk.  They both want a lot of things, of course, but neither of them can say those things out loud.  Historia thinks that may be why they were drawn to each other.

She knows that her awful, selfish, desires have shattered their tentative relationship.  She doesn’t even know what she was thinking, when she kissed Annie.  She never expected the other girl to reciprocate, not even for the several seconds she leaned in for.  

Historia decides that she has to talk to Annie, at least to apologize.  She tells herself that, but she’s come to value Annie’s presence and she can not stand the idea that her own terrible selfishness has caused them to grow apart.  Historia thinks, sometimes, that Annie knows that she is not who she really is.  Sometimes, Historia even envies Annie, because she can live without an overwhelming concern for the feelings of others.  

Annie leaves the classroom as fast as she can when the school day ends.  Historia almost stumbles trying to catch up with her.  Though they are both so short, Annie outstrides Historia almost immediately, until Historia has been left with no idea as to which hall she turned down or even which door she left through.  Annie probably saw her following.  Historia is almost hurt, but she wouldn’t want to talk to herself either.  She has been nothing but awful and selfish to Annie.

Historia waits outside of the school building for a few minutes.  The few minutes turn into an hour and a half, and the sun is lower overhead than before.  

She figures that by now Annie is in her dorm room.

Historia goes into the dorms for the first time.

They are well lit, and all the walls are this blueish off-white and there are student paintings and mirrors lining the walls.  

There are a few girls in couches in the lobby.  The couches are this soft, beige color, adorned with flowery pillows.

“Do you know where Annie Leonhardt’s room is?” Historia asks.

“Yeah,” a girl with pale pink skin and hair so light it is almost see through.  She is wearing a loose white tank top and shorts and Historia can see the girl’s milky white hipbone.

“Do you need to talk to her?” another girl asks.  “We can call her down here for you.”  This girl has dark, dark skin, that glows soft pink and off-white blue from the walls and pillows.  Her hair is close cropped and her eyes gaze softly at Historia.

“Yeah,” Historia says, “but I can just go to her room.  I wouldn’t want to trouble you,” she replies.  She does her best to make her voice sound light and airy and friendly.  

“It’s no big deal,” the girl with soft eyes says.  

“Oh no,” Historia says.  She just wants to go talk to Annie and say sorry and then leave.  “It’s just class stuff.”

“She’s Room 204,” another girl with wavy brown hair supplies.  “Second floor, fourth room, on the left.”  She pauses.  “Good luck talking to her.  About that class stuff.”

“Thank you,” Historia answers softly.  There is a glowing sign that indicates where the stairs are and Historia heads towards them.  The stairs are lightly carpeted, a soft off-white color.  They are scuffed slightly in some places and Historia brushes those places softly with her foot.

Annie’s room is normal.  There is a small black placard slid under the room number that says her name, and another slot below it that is blank.  The door has a shiny metal knob and a little ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign that makes Historia want to smile.  

She knocks on the door.

Nobody answers, except for the swishing around of clothing within.

Historia knocks again, to no avail.

“Annie,” she says, “it’s me.”  She realizes that sounds too familiar, too wrong.  “It’s Historia,” she amends.

Historia hears more movement of cloth against cloth beyond the door.  She stands there, in the hallway, waiting, for a tense eight seconds.  It lets her realize that he heart is beating fast and she is terrified of the idea of Annie disliking her.  

“Shouldn’t your mom have come and picked you up already?” Annie asks, in her soft and slow voice.  

“I don’t know,” Historia answers.  “Can I come in?”

Annie shrugs and turns her back on Historia, leaving the room’s door just a little bit open for Historia to walk through.  Historia stands surprised, but it seems like Annie is letting her in.  In her own way.

Historia doesn't know what to do with her feet or her hands and it seems neither does Annie, who looks pointedly away from Historia and at the wall instead.  Her face is devoid of emotion, positive or negative, and it makes Historia more nervous. Annie’s presence at all just makes her nervous anyways.

“Sorry for kissing you,” Historia says, “it was selfish of me and I was drunk and I don't want you to hate me.” She can't help the last part, knowing that's it's true but also knowing how terrible and selfish and manipulative the words are.  She knows, she knows, she knows, and she suddenly gets the urge to kiss Annie again so that she can be hated for her awful self.  She doesn't even like Annie like that, but she is so overcome by this fear of rejection that she has a hard time standing.

“I knew you were drunk,” Annie answers softly.  Her eyes are cast downwards, looking anywhere but Historia.  “And I don't hate you.” She looks tired.

Historia almost feels sad, that Annie doesn't hate her, because she deserves the hatred and she deserves to have her heart ripped from her chest.

“That’s good.” Historia whispers. “That’s. Thank you,” she says slightly louder but her stomach is hollow.

“Why did you do it?” Annie asks. “Kissing me, that is?” Her gaze is like cold water on Historia now and she feels like she is being looked through and it's almost welcome.

“I don't know,” Historia answers.  Her hands clamp up and she feels so terribly drained.  

“That... you realize that means literally nothing, right?  Like, you keep saying words but they don’t mean anything,” Annie answers. “You knew I didn't want to though, and you just said you didn't want me to hate you.  Do you even know what you're saying?” Her words are soft and cold and sweet and Historia does not want to listen to them.

“I do,” Historia answers and she wants to be sorry. “I'm sorry,” she says.  Maybe saying it will make it okay.

“,” Annie says.  Her eyes are tight and almost disappointed, like she had expected Historia to say more.

“I don't,” Historia says, “I don't like you like that and I'm so sorry for making you uncomfortable then and now,” she says, and now the words flow like water. “It's, it's just, I don’t know, I’m sorry Annie, I'm sorry.” She wants to yell and say it's her mother’s fault that she's so fucked up and that she's dumb and impulsive and selfish and that Annie is too beautiful for her.  She knows now, she knows that all she wants is the reassurance that someone else cares about her.  That’s all the dumb business with Annie and Reiner was.  But she hasn’t talked about herself like that before and she knows she won’t suddenly learn how to. 

“I knew that. I know that,” Annie answers.  She doesn't accept the apology and Historia half wishes she did and half wishes she didn't.  “We don't have to talk about it anymore.  I don't really care that much anyways,” she says, and Historia knows a liar when she sees one.  She is one, after all.  She ignores it though, if only to soothe her empty heart that keeps beating so awfully.

“Okay,” Historia answers. “Okay, that's good, I'm glad.” Historia wants to squeeze out a final ‘please don't hate me,’ but she knows that will make things worse and she is scared of not having someone like Annie to see her bullshit and not point it out. To just know.

“Yeah,” Annie answers. Her eyes trace the space around Historia’s head.

“I'm going to leave now,” Historia says softly.  “Bye Annie.”

“Later,” Annie responds, with her cold blue eyes locked with Historia’s.  Historia shuffles through the door into the hallway, hands clasped together.  She ponders the meaning of Annie’s parting words.  Later.  She isn't going to stop talking to her. Oh God, Thank God, she thinks to herself, her hands shaking softly.  She stops their movement as she walks down the hall.  Annie’s dorm door clicks shut and Historia is left alone, to walk down the stairs, to call her mom, to sit in her room alone with these emotions rattling around in her chest, like dice that she has bet on and she's not sure if she wants to win or lose.  

***

Ymir sees Historia studying alone in the library during an off.  She has white earbuds in, the wires disappearing into her soft looking hair.  She’s reading a textbook about anatomy, or biology, or medicine.  Something like that.  Ymir doesn't want to stare.  

She notices that Historia’s hands are pink about the knuckles and that she has a few band aids elsewhere.  Her eyes look tired and beneath them are soft purple bags.  Not too apparent, but dark enough that they can't be missed.

When the bell rings and the next period starts, Historia stands to put the book away and go to her next class.  It goes on a library cart, the one for books that have been read but aren't good enough to take home.  

Ymir takes a look at it and tried to pretend that she isn't.  The title has the words “Muscle” and “medicine” in it, but Ymir doesn't feel like reading the rest of it.  Historia seems like the type of person to want to heal others, she thinks.  She also thinks about the girl from Historia’s old shoebox, named Ana, who she wrote liked this sort of stuff.  

Ymir thinks about giving Historia the box back.  She wonders what she would do with it.  She hopes that maybe it will make her happy.

Ymir realizes that the only smiles she has seen on Historia’s pretty face have been vapid, hollow ones that looked less like smiles and more like grimaces, made by the pulling of a puppeteer at the corners of Historia’s mouth.  

 ***

Historia shivers slightly in class.  It's not particularly cold, but she feels like there is something encroaching on her.  Something breathing hot down the back of her neck.  

She doesn't want to think about the encounter with that girl, Ymir, that morning.  On one hand, she yearns for someone who knows how empty she is, but on the other hand, she fears rejection because of that.  She knows that Ymir saw through that dumb lie about not being at that stupid playground and puking.  Why would she lie about that?  For the sake of lying?  At this point did her lies have any point to them or was she only lying to people because she could?  She doesn't want to think too hard about it.

The teacher is speaking, solid words that Historia decides to hang onto.  They can replace the words rattling about in her head right now.  

“The oracle tells Oedipus that he is blind to the corruption of his own life, an ironic adage that foreshadows the gouging out of Oedipus’ eyes by his own two hands.” Historia absorbs the words.

“By the time he gouges out his own eyes, however, it seems he has finally truly gained sight.  He can see the terrible corruption of his life now, though he can no longer see anything else.  He is consumed by it.”  The teacher continues on.

Historia can not take it.  She doesn't want to listen anymore, to her teacher’s words.  She wonders if Annie was right, when she told Historia that she was empty.  Not maliciously, but out of companionship and pity.  Historia hopes that Annie will not be there to see herself stab her own eyes out.  How nice it would be, to never again see her own awful face in the mirror.

 ***

“You're switching to a public school?”  Annie asks, bored.  She looks down as she speaks and spins her pencil around her fingers.  Historia can hear and feel the soft tone of resignation and sadness, and wishes that she could be like Annie and feel like she did.  She wishes she could see something in her own self that was not ugly and fluorescent, false and eye-burning white.

“Yeah,” Historia answers.  “It's further away but I hear it has a good reputation for getting kids into medical school.  There's supposed to be a few really good teachers that can help me.” Historia does not mention that outside of these few teachers, the school isn’t very good.  That half the reason she's transferring is because one of the teachers knows her father and the other half is because it will look good for her father’s campaign, to have his daughter mingle with the common folks.  The medical school stuff is a nicely put afterthought.  Historia pretends she is satisfied with it.

“You want to go to medical school?” Annie asks, a soft tone of surprise just barely evident on her soft voice.  Historia remembers just how little she talks about herself.

“Yeah, I guess, I’ve always kind of wanted to help people.”  Historia has told herself this so many times that she isn’t sure if it’s true or not.

“Okay,” Annie answers, and goes back to reading through their assignment.  She doesn’t pry any further.

Historia looks back down at her assignment but the words are hard to focus on when her mind is grasping at so many things.

She never realizes that she is lying until she says things like this out loud to Annie.  She wonders what will happen to her in public school, if she will be able to find someone with a presence like Annie’s.  Perhaps she won’t find anyone and Historia will be able to live in terrible, blissful, ignorance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not dead i just write at a torturously slow pace. I keep promising to write faster but i never do??? i'm not abandoning this work though, i've spent too much time on it. the plot might move eventually. probably//


	9. Imagine Being Warmer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> getting to know eachother little by little

Historia sees Ymir from across the room. She always seems to be early to their shared art class. Her backpack underneath the table is black and old and a little dusty, leaning against her long freckled legs.

  
Armin’s eyes are soft and tired today, and he is poring over a thick little book held in his fingers. Historia spares it less than a glance, not really caring enough to see what it is that he’s reading. It’s yellow paged and the text looks small and dense and she doesn’t really care much about what he’s interested in.

  
Armin is hard for her to understand. Sometimes she gets angry at him, internally, for pretending to know her. Or knowing her well enough to know when she’s lying. At first she wanted to pretend that is was out of some sort of irritation, or fear, that he somehow had puzzled out how empty her own heart was.

Which was funny, because not even she knew exactly how vacant her cold little heart was. But what she thinks now, is that the intimacy of someone knowing her scares her. And that, no matter how much she thinks it over, she can not find any desire to learn about who he is.  
Of course, she’d like to know simple things. Like what his friendship with Mikasa and Eren is like, and what he’s good at. It’s more of a self indulgent thing, not a selfless thing. She sees them, as close as they are, and she envies them a little bit. To have people so close to you and so passionate and so full of love and life. Who loved your flaws and your soft fleshy hands and knobby back.

  
She’s also scared that her flaws are too great to be ignored, that she can’t be loved so thoroughly.

  
“We’re starting partner portraits today,” Hange began. “If you could get out the syllabus from the beginning of the semester, you can find the rubric and list of expectations for our projects.” The soft flipping of papers fills the room and Historia opens her folder to find her own syllabus. It has a dumb little doodle of a rose and a wide round eye in the corner. She skips the page and settles on the fourth one, the one titled ‘Week Five: Partner Portraits.’

  
Hange’s syllabus is pristinely organized, with rubrics and rules and expectations all outlined in neat and tidy Arial font. Historia often thinks that the syllabus is less for the students’ sake and more for Hange’s. Historia notices them getting swept up in the whole thrill of making art, regardless of whether the class appreciates it too.

  
Hange points at a boy with round, far apart eyes. He looks like a freshman.

  
“Read aloud, please,” they enunciate. The boy nods and looks down to follow the written lines with his eyes.

  
“The Partner Portraits project is based in observation and use of value and contrast. You’ll be using charcoal pencils of varying hardness to draw a from-life portrait of your partner, who will simultaneously be drawing you. The purpose of the activity is to portray their face when they are at a natural, comfortable angle, and to use your judgement to determine how to dramaticize or minimize values.”

  
Hange nods, sagely, before pointing again, at a girl with a narrow nose and thin cheeks.

  
“Next, please,” they say.

  
“To choose pairs, two names will be drawn randomly from a hat.”

Disappointment is palpable in the air. But Historia is almost glad to get away from Armin, who most likely would have partnered with her. She feels a little tired of emotional closeness and she would rather spend her art classes in suspended silence.

  
The girl who reads continues after a short pause. Her voice is thin, and it quavers over a few syllables.

  
“The portraits will be a two week long process consisting of becoming comfortable with your partner’s facial form, the preliminary sketching and composition of your piece, and finally the use of charcoal.”

  
Hange claps sharply, grinning.

  
“Any questions?” They ask.

Nobody raises a hand and they all look forward in expectation.

  
“Well,” they begin, “in my excitement, I already wrote out your names on slips of paper. Apologies if you were looking forward to that.” They grin, wider, dimples showing. “It’s that time of year that some of you are reading The Lottery, right?” Their tone is not friendly, more curious and probing. Historia is reminded of Ymir’s question this morning. Ymir is still there, across the room, with her sharp eyes and white shirt and ill-fitting jeans. Today it’s a little cooler than usual and it warrants a light extra layer. Historia almost always has one, anyways.

  
Last night she scratched her knuckles, a bad habit she can't even remember forming. Her peach colored cardigan is pulled over her little fingers at most times, hiding the raw skin. She didn’t, couldn't muster the motivation to bandage them so she had to deal with the constant fear that they would be pointed out.

  
Which was okay. It was her own fault anyways. Her own dumb decision had already been made.  
Armin notices, of course, in the beginning of class. His eyes dart down and Historia realizes her knuckles are bare and she quickly covers them. It only makes her more suspicious, of course, and Armin has the nerve to observe her with concern in his pretty round eyes. She doesn't want it.  
He doesn't say anything but she can feel the thoughts forming in his head and she wants them to stop. She wants to yell, to tell him he shouldn't concern himself with her (that she doesn't deserve his gaze).

  
Hange does not let Historia finish her thoughts. Their voice sweeps through the frosty thoughts still clinging to the inside of Historia’s head, melting them.

  
Their voice is methodical, bright, interested. They call each pair with excitement.

  
Armin’s name is called fifth. He is paired with a little freshman girl, with black curly hair and plump freckled arms. She’s pretty, with a hooked curving nose and Historia is sure that Armin will draw her well.

  
Historia’s name is called near last.  
“Historia,” Hange calls, before plucking another name from the ratty baseball cap that all the names are held in. “And, Ymir!” Hange nods thoughtfully and moves on to the next pair.

  
Historia does not look across the room at her partner. Perhaps out of spite, because she knows Ymir is looking at her. Or perhaps because she is scared that she will see, in the other girl’s eyes, an interest that is too heavy for Historia’s knobby back to bear.  
Historia takes a deep breath then goes across the room to sit by Ymir. Armin observes her with a subdued interest.

  
“Hey,” Historia starts. “I'm not very good at drawing, so sorry if the portrait looks awful.” She doesn't really look at Ymir and focuses on her forehead instead. Ymir has remarkably smooth and even skin, with just a few pimples near her hairline and a little redness otherwise. She has a few stray freckles there as well.

  
“I don't really care,” Ymir answers. She grins. “I'm just here to get an easy A.”

Historia pushes the conversation further.  “You really look like a talented artist, your” Historia pauses to collect her thoughts, hoping she doesn’t sound as woefully inadequate at art as she truly is, “your drawings and stuff are really incredible.” 

“Thanks,” Ymir says. Historian wants to continue the conversation, wanting desperately for some reason for Ymir to see her as airheaded and friendly, and not as an anxious wreck who threw up on public property like some sort of freak. 

“I feel sort of lucky that someone so good at drawing is my partner.”  She ventures.

”Yeah,”  Ymir draws out.  “Kind of cool to be partnered with, like, a flagrant liar.” Historia stops at the jab, her heart stopping for just a moment.  

  
Historia forces a look of questioning. “I don't know what you're talking about.” She forces a thin, fake smile, before looking at Ymir’s sketchbook. She sees Ymir opening her mouth so she rushes to supply more conversation.

  
“Wow!” She exclaims. “You're great at drawing, Ymir.” The name is weird and foreign on her tongue and the way it rolls about her mouth is strange.

  
“Mm-hmm,” Ymir answers. She is studying Historia and it seems as though she wants to bring it up again. Historia hopes she doesn't.

  
“Do you want to start?” Historia asks, softer. She looks up at Ymir and makes eye contact. She doesn't like the feeling of eyes on hers. She doesn't shiver, but she feels like she should.

  
“Sure.”

  
The rest of the class period is quiet, and their pencils scratch across the page. There’s a soft ambient hum of people speaking. But Historia doesn’t really notice them. She holds her sleeve over her knuckles so that Ymir can’t see the raw skin. It’s started to become a grayer brown color in the area with only slight hints of redness. They’ll scar over by tomorrow. Historia wonders when she got so familiar with this.

  
Historia doesn’t want to draw Ymir. The sharp curve of the other girl’s nose, she notices, is softer at the end. Her eyes are heavily lidded and her eyebrows are dark only in the center. The rest of the hairs branch out in soft little thread-like connections. And there are the freckles, dark brown and orange-ish and almost alien. Historia decides that she will never be able to draw her correctly.

  
Her pencil strokes feel clumsy and childlike. They are either too hard or too light and they accumulate. Gray mistakes collect on her page and Historia does not hate the drawing. She does not hate her pencil, or the teacher. She hates herself and her scratched raw knuckles. Her hands are not meant for such a delicate task. They were made to create pain and to endure it.

  
Historia stops and just looks down at her hands, stained with graphite. They have the slightest wobble to them. She is suddenly overcome with the desire to rip up her paper and her sketchbook, to pour icy water on it until it is just pulp. Not because she’s bad at drawing. But because she wishes she could destroy everything that is her and everything that she is.  
Her cardigan sleeve is covered with stray fibers and they curl into her knuckles like they were made to be irritants. It isn’t so bad, not really.

  
The result of her efforts is so irritatingly incorrect. Historia stares down at it when Hange tells them to stop drawing and feels so terribly empty. Ymir, as Historia has drawn her, is looking down intently at something, with smudged eyelashes and a nose that is too round in all the wrong places.

  
Historia glances at Ymir’s drawing. It is not breathtaking. It is Historia and she notices that Ymir has exaggerated the bags under her eyes and the softness of her nose and the darkness of her eyelashes. It is her, but it is not. Perhaps it is closer to Historia’s likeness than the specter in the mirror. But Historia feels strange. Is this how Ymir sees her? Is this representative of the girl she sees?

  
“You like it?” Ymir asks. Her tone of voice does not make Historia think that Ymir particularly cares either way. She’s asking more as a gauge, to analyze Historia.

  
“I look… tired,” Historia answers. “It’s nice.”

  
Ymir nods and looks down at the drawing.

  
“You certainly do look tired.”

  
Historia feels like she could read into the words, but they don’t sound too deep. She likes that.

  
“It’s good. I like it,” she says again.

  
“I better get a good grade on it then,” Ymir says.  Her voice is grating and Historia likes it, sort of, the way she immediately wants to argue but also sort of wants to smirk.

  
They don’t speak and, like they are in sync but off by a heartbeat, they put pencils and notebooks and erasers away. Ymir nods as Historia waves at her, leaving for her seat.

  
Historia feels a little less empty, as though the short interaction has made her feel a little more real. Maybe because Ymir’s words are straightforward and maybe because she likes silence and the scratching of pencils. Either way, she thinks that today will be better than tomorrow.

***

Ymir has always loved the idea of driving and driving until she is alone and there is nobody but her and the desert. But she also thinks about the cost of gas, and the cramps that will surely appear, and the thought is less appealing.

Instead she leaves the house to walk about and be idle and bored.  
She is in love with the idea of movement but she lacks the desire to commit to it. Even her bored actions, like scratching at her neck or picking at her cuticles, are abandoned halfway through.

  
It’s how she feels about Historia, who is always strange. She sort of wants to involve herself, but also doesn’t want to care. She wants, very badly, to not care at all about the other girl. But she has a box full of old letters and other shit, and honestly, Ymir knows, there is already a space in her heart for Historia.

  
Which is terrible, because they don’t even know eachother and all their interactions have been incredible farces on Historia’s part. Ymir doesn’t see why she keeps lying to her.

  
Of course, she could easily point it out. But she also wonders, if she lets her, how long Historia will keep lying.

  
She notices a lot of things that she could point out. Historia’s sleeves were perpetually pulled over her hands during art, and no matter how often Ymir glanced at them, they refused to slip.

  
There might be no meaning to that; as could easily be reading too far into their interactions with each other. Like the soft half-teasing between the two. Ymir decides to leave the vomit thing alone, for just a bit, if only to make it easier to prod at her in the future when hopefully they know each other better.

  
Which is kind of an odd thought; to have some sort of plan for some sort of future interaction. Which may or may not happen. It's not as though they had any sort of deep or exciting interaction today, during art class, but it seemed nice. It was guarded, and quiet, and dripping with the unsaid and untouched but their hushed breaths and the scratch of pencils was a soothing balm to an ache she wasn't quite aware that she had. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry. i haven't really liked snk at all for a long time but i DO like a select few fanfics that rewrote the characters basically but better so that's all i care about. i want to at least reach some sort of conclusion eventually (?) so i might just post short stuff until then. thanks all. i'm kochoubeasuko on tumblr and i practically only post golden kamuy if that's ur thing i guess thanks


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